Snowbound in the Poconos
by mariu100
Summary: It's Hole in the Heart, minus Broadsky, eerie music, and dead squints. What's left, you ask? Well, plenty it turns out, particularly the tidbits that didn't quite make it off the cutting room floor. Takes place after The Signs in the Silence. T, for now.
1. Start Your Engines

The disgruntled sigh which escaped Special Agent Seeley Booth was meant to be heard, and heard it certainly was by his stony-faced companion though it seemed to make very little impression.

"Remind me again why we're heading into the boonies in the middle of a blizzard? Donut guy's been dead for at least two months. Couldn't this wait? It's not like out-of-control storms haven't caused us enough problems already. Last one, I threw my back out..."

His beautiful, blue-eyed passenger glanced over with a jaded expression.

"Which I fixed."

"And _then"_ the agent went on defiantly, annoyed at his partner for always pooh-poohing his grievances no matter how valid they were, "a huge Russian guy carrying the plague landed right on top of me."

As he drove, Booth's eyes traded off carelessly between the anthropologist and the road-hogging truck they were passing. Brennan's neck and shoulder muscles-tight already after a four hour drive-tightened even more, adding to her incipient headache. She sincerely hoped road conditions improved as they left this stretch of highway behind; it would be a shame to have to take her brand new car in for major repairs barely a month after having purchased it.

"You keep referring to the victim as a bakery item, while he might be more accurately compared to an egg. The remains were definitely more oval in appearance. Didn't they teach you to differentiate shapes in grammar school?"

Her tone was snide, maybe even a little vicious; the unhappy combination of Booth's nonstop complaining and his incautious driving habits were definitely starting to grate.

The man they were referring to, aka 'donut guy,' had just been identified by the Jeffersonian as Martin Snell, a well-known and infamously nasty Virginia divorce attorney turned Poconos looney-tunes hermit. His desiccated remains had been found in an abandoned factory in Washington, curiously hunched over into the shape of a ball. Hence the unflattering but fairly apt-at least according to Booth-term, 'donut guy'.

The agent brushed off Brennan's malignant stare.

"We were talking about the plague, Bones. Don't try to change the subject."

"As usual, your conversational patterns rely too heavily on both misconceptions and hyperboles, Booth. The man wasn't Russian. He was Albanian, and your willful refusal to recognize his ethnic background by continually referring to him as Boris only prompted him to act even more aggressively towards you. And it also wasn't the plague. It was Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever which, diagnosed early enough, is highly responsive to antiviral treatment as are modern viral and bacterial strains of the plague. I can assure you that you were in absolutely no danger of dying."

"Goody-that makes the memory of that day _so_ much better, including the giant horse pills I had to take for two weeks. And it still doesn't answer my original question of why we have to do this _today._"

Brennan steeled herself for the delivery of a lecture that she felt wouldn't have been required if she only worked with a more rational human being.

"We have to get to the victim's place as soon as possible now that his remains have been positively identified. The length of time that Snell has been deceased should make a search of his dwelling even more of a priority for us. As you are well aware, the longer that evidence is exposed to the elements at a potential crime scene, the greater the risk that it will be compromised or destroyed thus becoming worthless. Not pursuing this lead when we already know about it would be a highly irresponsible act; a clear dereliction of both our civic and professional duties. Besides, why are you in such a hurry to get back to DC anyway?"

"You _know_ why. Because those front-row Capitals tickets I paid a lot of money for are for Friday night, which happens to be in oh..." Booth pretended to look at his watch "...I don't know, _five hours" _he snarled.

_"_Two days ago, when I told you Parker came down with mono and couldn't go with me to the game, you were all gung-ho about taking his place. Is this your way of backing out at the last minute, by having us take off on some crazy errand until we miss the damn thing? Because really, if you don't want to go, just say so; I still have time to ask one of the guys at work."

"You shouldn't sound so ungracious about my offer, Booth. After all, I only said I was going as a favor to you."

Her blindsided partner did a double-take.

"I'm sorry" he said, in an aggrieved tone. "A favor to _me_?"

"Of course. I didn't want you to feel marginalized by having to attend a public sporting event by yourself. I also happen to know that the enjoyment of athletic rituals is greatly enhanced within the context of a social setting. It's a way for the concomitant feelings of euphoria or despair elicited by the final outcome of the competition to be shared and thus experienced more fully by the spectator."

"So after all that mumbo-jumbo, what you're really saying is you were only offering because you felt sorry for me, because you didn't think I could fill the extra seat on my own."

"In essence, yes."

"I don't need your sympathy, Bones. What, you didn't think I could find anyone else to go with me? I'll have you know I got friends. Lots of friends," Booth retorted petulantly. "Hundreds of friends."

"Sure you do."

"What's that supposed to mean? And it's not like you're some party animal with a huge social life yourself. Your idea of a good time on a Friday night is reading the Encyclopedia Britannica while you chow down on a tofu hotdog alone in your apartment. Am I right, or what?"

Brennan appeared genuinely incensed by the decidedly unappealing assessment of her social life and when Booth caught a glimpse of her down-turned mouth, he immediately felt remorse for being so hard on her. Things really weren't all _that_ bad, he acknowledged; they still had plenty of time to make it back before the puck drop.

Besides, the company could be worse.

Sweets probing, Daisy yammering, Hodgins doing...well, what Hodgins did.

Yup, way worse.

He glanced over, ready with the half-assed apology he was certain would calm her down, when he was inexplicably hit over the head with a crystal clear image of an alternate future life with his partner. One in which they _weren't_ just partners. For a second, the agent was completely engulfed by feelings of affection and desire so strong for the crabby woman sitting beside him, so overwhelming, they made him lose his original train of thought.

Feelings that also appeared, at least in his delirious imaginings, to be reciprocated. Love forever sandwiched between rounds of gentle bickering, like the white cream filling inside a Little Debbie Cake.

The obligatory "I'm sorry, Bones," never found its way out.

But there was more.

Because the tongue-tied Ranger was also sure that in his weird deja vu, crazy parallel-universe vision he'd been given, he and Brennan were married. One hundred percent, iron-clad, happily married. The unlikely warm and fuzzy domestic picture of them together in that way-so completely out of sync with anything out of his own family's threadbare past-left a painful void in his chest as it began to fade.

Blinking the last of the aching snapshots away, Booth focused on the rhythmic 'swish-swish' of the wiper blades to help him find his way back to the present. When he finally managed to snap out of his temporary stupor he noticed that he wasn't the only one who seemed to have been daydreaming; his companion also looked eerily absent as she stared blankly at the passing scenery.

She turned to him slowly and their eyes met.

"So, you don't want me to go with you?" Brennan asked in a quiet voice that, much as she'd tried to disguise, still carried something akin to uncertainty and hurt in its timbre. She looked away, mortified at having put her weaknesses out on such overt display.

Booth sensed the sudden shift in his parter's mood and decided to dial down his own prickly act a notch or two.

"Yeah-I want you to go with me, Bones" he replied in an equally hushed tone. "I just want you to want it too, as much as _I_ want it."

They both seemed to recognize that the comment could be interpreted in one of several ways and the car suddenly grew silent again. Speed bumps, potholes, stop lights and caution signs, sometimes crowded into the field of vision all at once. Obstacles that made it almost impossible to get a good view of both the wonders and the dangers that lay ahead.

Nothing about Booth and Brennan's relationship was simple these days; the road they were on-had been on since that last blizzard they'd accidentally spent together crammed inside a tiny elevator with a bunch of metal chairs for company-continued to require very, very delicate handling. But still, being who they were, the partners drove on despite all the many potential hazards in their way.


	2. Boxing Day

"The trip shouldn't take long" Brennan said, keeping her eyes carefully glued to the stack of materials piled in front of her.

At least those disparate, wrinkled bits of loose paper sitting on her lap were easier to deconstruct and analyze than the mess of feelings her partner routinely brought out in her, particularly of late. It had, perhaps, always been that way when it came to him; but over the last few months her latent inner-turmoil had definitely reached epidemic, near-crippling proportions.

Because depressingly, finally understanding what one wanted out of life did not necessarily equate with knowing how to get it-even with several impressive doctorate degrees staring down at one's learned self from every wall.

"It's not as if I'm going to go over Snell's cabin with a mass spectrometer" she continued, giving in to Booth's juvenile need for reassurance. "I hardly brought any equipment. My only purpose in going there is to ascertain whether there's any possibility that the murder could have been committed at his place. If our brief inspection supports that conclusion the Jeffersonian staff and the FBI technicians can perform a more thorough investigation of the premises tomorrow. Consider this a scouting trip."

"_Shouldn't take long?_ We've been driving for four hours in practically white-out conditions and we have four more to drive back, not counting however long we stay at Snell's hut. My back is starting to hurt."

"You're overdramatizing the facts once again in another effort to garner undue sympathy. It's barely flurrying; the bulk of the storm isn't even supposed to hit this part of Pennsylvania for at least six more hours. Besides, we're almost there-and I'll drive on the way back, if the thought brings you any comfort."

After closing the thick folder in her hands and placing it back down on the floor of the car the anthropologist looked up, fixing her partner with a gaze that was both solemn and oddly intense.

"We'll make it to your game and I promise that once there I _will_ enjoy myself. I was being disingenuous before, Booth; I _want_ to be there. I want it as much as you do."

The statement was issued with a seriousness that made Booth squirm in his seat.

Brennan's eyes went back to the colorless landscape but before long she threw another quick, clandestine glance in Booth's direction, which she unhappily noticed he caught.

The agent felt something, an electric spark, do an end-zone victory dance up and down the muscles flanking his spine. She wanted to be _there_, with _him_. Were they still talking about sports, he wondered?

"And _you_ want to be there, obviously, so it should all work out, right?" she asked innocently, catching herself just in the nick of time and seamlessly switching back to the self-assured Brennan of old.

So maybe it was only about the hockey, after all.

"Uh huh. But you're buying the first round of beer for making me do this. In your 'smart' car, which you're making me drive. You know I hate this thing. It wants to do everything for you. It tells you not to pass when you want to pass, it breaks when you don't want to break. I can do my own parallel parking job just fine, thank you very much-I'm not fourteen. And can I tell you it's not the safest thing on this ice pond we've been driving on? My SUV would've been _way_ better."

"Has it crossed your mind that this car may actually be smarter than you? Perhaps you should consider following it's advice."

"_Really_? This car is _not_ smarter than me."

The barb had unerringly found its mark right in the center of her partner's brittle ego, but Brennan refrained from smiling in order to keep the fighting-and her headache-to a minimum. Her raised eyebrows, however, had no problem betraying her gratuitous merriment at his expense.

"My car is better," Booth taunted back in the most childish tone he could come up with.

"The _government's_ fuel-inefficient car," Brennan reminded him, eliciting another fierce scowl. "I already explained it to you at length, Booth; significant portions of the research materials for the book I'm writing were scattered all over my car in preparation for my upcoming trip and I needed to organize them while you drove because I won't have time later tonight. There was far too much paperwork for me to move in an expeditious manner. Had I bothered to pack everything and transfer it to your vehicle before we left we'd still be in Washington. It would've taken a great deal of time which, as you so aptly pointed out and continue to bring up with excruciating regularity, is at a premium given that we need to be at your hockey rink in a few hours. Taking my car was yet another example of my overall thoughtfulness when it comes to your wellbeing."

Booth rolled his eyes but opted to change the topic before they accidentally fell into another one of their epic pro-wrestling matches.

"Hockey _arena_. So you still planning on going out of town this weekend with all this crap coming down?"

"Yes; I'm leaving tomorrow morning. The worst of the snow is supposed to be over by then and I'm certain that the interstate highways will be plowed and salted anyway. Road conditions shouldn't be a problem. Since the lab is closed on Monday for the yearly fire-code inspection, I'm taking the opportunity to attend a conference in Baltimore on the preservation of neolithic drawings in the Tassili n'Ajjer region of the Saharan Desert. I know several of the speakers and I find the topic fascinating as well as compelling, so it should be a highly enjoyable break."

Brennan waited to see if Booth had some disparaging remark to say about her choice of adjective for the upcoming weekend, but he appeared not to have taken note of it. Either he missed it, or he'd uncharacteristically resolved to be a little nicer the rest of the trip. And then it came, the tongue-in-cheek expression that she knew so well and that never failed to irritate her.

"Loads of fun, there, Bones."

"What are _you_ doing this weekend? Do you have Parker?" she asked in return, bypassing the tempting opportunity to get in yet another dig.

"No-and for once in my life I'm glad. Like I need to catch something called 'the kissing disease' at my age-I can just hear the comments at work. It's payback time for Rebecca" he said, giving free reign to the smuggest of grins.

That disarming smile, silly, uncalled for, immature as it was, far more appropriate on a ten-year-old boy's face than that of a nearly forty-year-old man, still got to Brennan with it's unrestrained mischief and she found herself smiling along with her partner, totally against her better judgment.

"Are you planning on working part of the weekend, then? If we find anything in Snell's cabin, you could hook a leg around this case."

"G_et a leg up _on the case, Bones; there's no hooking of any kind going on here. And no, I'm not going anywhere near the office; they scheduled this stupid FBI teamwork retreat Saturday through Monday out in some dorky boy scout campsite. Paintball, lots of talking, trust exercises-all the twelve-year old girl hooey Sweets loves. At least _someone's_ gonna be having a good time."

"Oh-I remember. That _too_ should be enjoyable."

"It won't be" he replied flatly, ignoring the cascade of sarcasm oozing from her voice. "And that's why I said I had an out-of-town emergency and I couldn't go; I am _not _singing Kumbaya on my hard-earned, personal time. I don't want to blow my cover by showing up at the Hoover this weekend. Donut guy can wait."

"Is that why you were home when I called you this morning?"

"Yup-part of my cover."

"What did you tell them?"

"I said I had a dying uncle in Idaho I had to visit and I needed to leave this afternoon before it was too late."

"Idaho? You've probably never even been there, Booth. Besides, a rudimentary search of your family records by personnel would reveal you have no living uncles and almost certainly no relatives whatsoever in that state. You're an FBI agent; you should be intimately acquainted with the tenet that the more complex a lie is the more likely it is to fall apart under review. Effective deceit always requires a solid basis in facts familiar to the deceiver."

"What's complex about Idaho? Potatoes, rodeos, lots of hay. It's not like anyone's going to be asking me what I did there; it's _Idaho_, not Paris."

"You've been warned."

A large, dark blob suddenly appeared to their left through the curtain of pelting snowflakes.

"Hey, there's the ranger's station. We better stop and ask someone for pointers on getting to donut guy's cabin-it looked like a bear to find on Google maps. Nothing's marked."

"Oh, that is very good" she said, her eyes growing wide as she suddenly burst into a rare peal of uninhibited laughter. "Bears-because we're in a state park, and there's bears here!"

Booth stared at his partner with the look of a long-suffering cellmate.

"Yes, that's hilarious, Bones. No booze for you tonight; I think you might be buzzed enough already."

He applied the brakes very slowly when he saw the sign for the visitor's lot in the rear but the car still skidded in a thin layer of slush before finally coming to an inelegant stop.

"See-didn't I tell you! Sucky brakes; not _smart_ brakes."

Brennan made a sour face as they pulled into the station's empty parking lot, an expression which remained unchanged as the couple walked made its way to the modern wood structure with its overdone rustic cabin motif.

"And for the record" Booth commented out of nowhere, "I got friends."

The anthropologist's face slowly rearranged itself to reveal the teensiest of smirks.

"Apparently, hundreds."


	3. Ranger Rick

The stout, red-faced man sitting behind the information desk stared at the two people coming through the door with a definite sense of wonder. He couldn't have seemed more surprised by their appearance in his station had they just emerged from a flying saucer, gangly, bug-eyed and day-glo green all over.

He rose to his feet and, quickly slamming a ranger's hat back on his balding pate, waited for the whirlwind of cold air and snow that had burst into the room with the newcomers to subside before issuing his well-practiced greeting.

"Howdy folks. Can I help you with anything?" he asked, his voice both friendly and curious.

His avid interest in them was obvious and Brennan guessed that the ranger had probably stopped expecting visitors for the day, with the deteriorating weather conditions likely being a deterrent to less tenacious travelers.

"Hitched at the courthouse, right?" the man suggested hopefully, nodding towards the pair's dress clothes.

Brennan's mouth fell open in outrage, but the expression failed to produce a single sound.

"Lots around here, especially on the weekends. If you're looking for hotels, there's a whole bunch of brochures on accommodations on that rack over there. Some really romantic little nooks with fireplaces and heart-shaped pools for honeymooners-even pools that look like champagne glasses" the ranger gushed, giving his increasingly flummoxed listeners a sage smile. "We may have been replaced by Vegas as the top honeymoon destination in the U.S., but the Poconos is still a great little spot for couples. You might want to find a place fast though, while you can still see three feet ahead of you. It's getting nasty out there. I just heard the wind is really starting to blow in from the northwest and that's never a good thing when there's so much Gulf moisture up in the air; I was just about to close shop and get my behind outta here while I still could. Now they're saying the thing could last for days and dump up to four feet of snow."

He shook his head ruefully.

"Crazy, crazy weather we're having; snow in late April. Nuts."

Brennan finally found her voice.

"We're _not_ on our honeymoon" she retorted testily, incensed that anyone could dismiss her and Booth's obvious professionalism so cavalierly.

Why were people so inordinately fond of leaping to conclusions about their relationship, she wondered angrily? Were their wishes and fears when it came to each other really _that_ obvious to the rest of the world?

Booth, who until now had been stunned into silence by the man's incredibly risky assumptions, finally decided to speak up before his partner's mushrooming irascibility turned into physical rage. The clueless ranger obviously had no idea just who he was dealing with; Bones on a bad day wasn't just dangerous-she was downright lethal.

"Nooo! _No_ honeymoon," he exclaimed, shaking his head like he'd seen one of the bloody apparitions from _The Shining_. "And we're definitely _not_ looking for hotels with heart-shaped pools."

He bolstered his vigorous denial by pulling out his badge, just so there'd be no more misunderstandings. The situation between him and Bones was already tense enough after their last meteorologically-cursed outing together without strangers pouring kerosene all over their humble little candle. They could hopefully get to that elusive _there_ all on their own without any third-party prodding. Wherever _there_ was supposed to be.

"I'm Special Agent Seeley Booth and this is my partner, Dr. Temperance Brennan. Have you ever heard of a guy called Martin Snell?"

Booth showed the stocky man Angela's facial reconstruction of the deceased featuring lots of scraggly, overgrown facial hair, and then he handed him a photograph of what was presumably the same man, younger, still distinctly unattractive, but much better groomed.

"Old man Snell? Sure; he lives in the park. You can't work here and not know him."

The ranger pored over the two depictions of the victim, holding them away from his face at different angles.

"The photo I don't recognize, but the drawing definitely looks like him."

"What do you mean, he lives _in_ the park?" Brennan interrupted.

"The Pennsylvania Department of Natural Resources condemned all the land around his place when they added this area to the main reserve a few years ago. They offered Snell a ton of money to buy him out being that he was the last private owner left in the area, but he wouldn't do it-said he was some bigwig attorney from DC who'd just retired and that he wasn't going anywhere. If you ask me, the guy's a little off. He threatened to take everyone to court and derail the entire park creation process if anyone set foot on his property; the environmentalists about had a fit. Right around his house is one of the prime habitats in the state for the shale barren pussytoes."

Brennan nodded gravely.

"The shale barren _what_?" Booth asked, his eyebrows practically meeting in the center of his forehead in bewilderment. "What the hell is _that_?"

"Antennaria Virginica" his partner replied. "A deciduous groundcover known for its affinity to poor soils; I believe it's an endangered species in this area."

"What, you channeling Hodgins now?"

The ranger looked impressed, and perhaps even a little smitten despite the fact that the object of his affection clearly didn't seem the least bit interested in returning any of his good will.

"The lady knows her Pennsylvania flora. There's a group devoted to the preservation of the pussytoes-they're knows as 'the kitties', which is a good thing because the other critter name they might have gone with wasn't so family friendly."

"The pussies? What's remotely salacious about that?" Brennan asked, looking as confused as Booth had been just seconds ago

"You're lady friend is a gem!" the park ranger chuckled approvingly.

The response was immediate-and predictable.

"I'm _not_ Agent Booth's _lady friend_," the anthropologist replied with heat.

The garrulous man, obviously not merely content with testing Brennan's patience, had apparently set out to test the limits of his lifespan as well.

Booth couldn't take even a second more of the increasingly deranged conversational detour. Doing a quick chopping motion with his hands he set out to fence in the posse of clowns threatening to ruin what was left of his Friday night.

Really, didn't _anyone_ care that there was a very expensive hockey game on the line?

"On topic, people. Snell?"

The ranger's head snapped back to attention.

"Oh, Snell, right. I think the government hoo-has thought it was easier and cheaper to have him stay on than to fight him, so they let him keep what is known as an 'inholding'. He has an easement to get in and out of the park. The state lawyers probably figured they'd be better off waiting and condemning the property after he dies; I doubt any relatives of his are going to be falling all over themselves to live out there. The land's use has been restricted for years, even before Snell moved in. You can't build anything new on it and the road going there is a mess."

Their interviewee suddenly looked suspicious.

"He get into trouble or something?"

"No, he's dead. He was found murdered in Washington. _Was_ he the kind of guy that gets into trouble?"

"That explains a lot-it's been pretty quiet out there lately. You know, I probably knew Snell better than most, which isn't saying much, and I can't really say he was too bad. Kept to himself, mostly. Had 'No Trespassing' signs all over the place, but other than messing a little with hikers-you know, hollering, shooting his air rifle, beating a few pots and pans, it's not like he ever did anything to anyone he found walking around his cabin. Don't know how he did it, staying in that old shack without gas or electricity. I'm pretty sure his propane tank's been empty most of the winter. His place looks like something Abraham Lincoln would have lived in, except not nearly as nice. A Martha Stewart log home it sure ain't. Looked even worse last week when I last saw it last after the bad winter we've had but that figures since he hasn't been around to work on it."

"Is there a driveable road out there?" Booth asked.

"Depends on what you're driving. Service trucks do all right; Snell had a jeep."

Booth gave Brennan a dirty look.

"Regular car."

"In _this_ weather?" the man asked with an expression of humorous incredulity. "I wouldn't recommend it. Thought you fancy FBI types all drove tough, he-man vehicles," he teased.

"Apparently, it's a car with a graduate degree. Can we make it?"

"If you're determined enough, probably so-just keep checking the latest weather reports on the emergency channel because when it gets too bad they just shut down the road through the park without much warning-too many icy turns. They don't start plowing again until the main highways are clear, which could take a while these days with all the budget cuts. And in any case don't put it off too long; after dark, the dirt path to his cabin is really hard to see-no room to turn around until the end, neither, without risking falling into a ditch. There's all sorts of ravines out there too, and the snow isn't going to help things. Here, let me give you this trail map, and I'll do my best to draw where the road to his place starts. Since it goes through private property, it isn't on the regular ones we hand out to visitors."

"Thanks. Listen, Ranger..." Booth scrunched up his eyes, staring at the man's name tag and immediately breaking into a huge grin.

"John Rick. I know; I get that look all the time."

Brennan looked puzzled.

"It's Ranger Rick, Bones!" Booth said with the unvarnished amazement of a six-year old. Not surprisingly, the name didn't seem to do much for his partner. "Oh, forget it," he huffed.

The agent turned back to the park employee.

"If you remember anything about Snell or any unusual people who might have been wandering around his property recently, give me a call. You've been a lot of help."

"Sure. Always happy to assist the feds."

Booth gave the man his card.

"I'm telling you; watch out for those ravines," the ranger shouted as his guests left. "They get awfully slick in this weather. Like going down an icy mountain on a toboggan, except without the toboggan."

Brennan marched back to the car in a distinct snit, repeatedly swatting away the barrage of stinging ice crystals that were blowing into her eyes while narrowly avoiding walking right through the middle of a snowdrift.

The conversation with the ranger had left her in a bad mood, although she couldn't quite put her finger on precisely why. Maybe four hours in a confined space with Booth and the specter of four more had begun to take their toll-which in and of itself raised some interesting questions. She turned her back on the strong winds and peered at the directions the man had drawn out for them.

"You must be feeling very generous today" she told her partner disparagingly, folding the paper in half and plunking her behind back in the passenger seat, Booth's sore back be damned.

"The man was not only compulsively exasperating-which behavior you tacitly encouraged by allowing him to needlessly ramble on-he was practically of no help to us. This topographical depiction he provided might actually be worse than possessing nothing at all. If we're late to your game, you only have yourself to blame."

"_Encouraged_?" Booth asked in an offended tone. "I was getting _information_, Bones; isn't that why we came all the way out here when we could've been sitting with a cold beer rink-side an hour ago? I can't help it if the guy had nothing else to do and went a little overboard with all the advice. For what it's worth, he certainly made _way_ more sense to me than your know-it-all car. Besides, a little kindness goes a long way in this business; always good to keep a spare in the trunk. That's also why _I_ have friends."

Brennan put her newly-organized research materials in the back seat and placed the map on her lap.

"Not in this car," she replied under her breath.


	4. Clearing in the Woods

With the pavement quickly turning to slurry and the clouds shifting to an even more toxic shade of steel-wool, Booth's mood-iffy already-began a sharp, threatening nosedive south. What could have once been categorized as mere crankiness was now reaching positively Vesuvian levels.

Miles through the park's deserted main road revealed no signs of any kind of clearing in the woods which might lead to donut guy's cabin. And after nearly four hours of constant breaking and accelerating because he absolutely refused to hand over the reins of his fate to the vagaries of cruise-control, the mild burning sensation along his spine had become a gargantuan, epic knot which no amount of butt-shifting in his seat was likely to untie.

Could there be any sort of upside to this ill-timed expedition that might justify the tons of ibuprofen he was going to have to choke down later tonight? The loss of two perfectly good, center-ice seats along with a steady supply of cold beer?

Where was the silver lining that he almost always managed to find in almost every situation?

He sullenly concluded that this time around, there just wasn't any.

And _that's_ when things finally reached a boiling point for the agent. Slamming the steering wheel of Brennan's car hard, he let out a resentful grunt before tightening his knuckles once again in a stranglehold around the slender, vinyl-wrapped circle. The automotive component might not be to blame for their current situation, but since _someone_ couldn't pay, _something_ had to.

Because he couldn't very well throttle his partner although he was sorely tempted to, for lots of different but equally valid reasons.

She was, after all, his partner. It wouldn't look good on his record to be charged with assault and battery on a coworker, especially a woman.

And perhaps an even bigger concern, he was well aware that Bones was more than capable of defending herself. The prospect of spending the next two weeks icing his nether parts or possibly looking for their replacement was really not such a pleasant one.

Plus, the most troubling fact of all remained-he liked the occasionally infuriating forensic anthropologist _way_ too much. Sometimes far, far more than was at all remotely safe for his mental health.

So rather than take things out on her as he was currently fantasizing about, he gripped the innocent wheel harder and whacked the radio button on to release some of his pent-up irritation. Hopefully, his blatant manhandling of his partner's new prized possession would telegraph loud and clear to her just how unhappy he was at now coming dangerously close to missing the entire first period of the game.

"Please be more gentle with the electronics in the car" she scolded sternly, bypassing a discussion of the possible source of his bad temper.

Booth could be _such_ a baby sometimes, Brennan griped in silence, watching him press random buttons on the console of her car. She looked down her nose in his direction and frowned.

Tension, tension, tension.

Both passenger and driver were feeling it, though neither seemed willing to acknowledge why it was there at all-why it'd been there for months.

While the two partners stewed in their respective vats of unidentified frustration, an official-sounding voice suddenly droned on to life on the radio.

_In others news, this is a reminder to all of our listeners that there is a winter weather alert in effect beginning at six pm tonight and continuing until late Sunday morning for the following counties... Expect up to four feet of snow to accumulate in some outlying areas with drifts up to eight feet high, and winds possibly gusting to 45 miles per hour. The state's Department of Transportation has requested that non-emergency vehicles stay off roads and highways in all affected areas. Commissioner Michael Campos warns that poor driving conditions and impaired visibility may make it impossible for emergency crews to reach stranded travelers in a timely manner and urges the use of caution and common sense when going outside. Again, a winter weather advisory..._

A final poke from a restless finger abruptly turned the radio off. The FBI agent looked to his right, a belligerent I-told-you-so practically pouncing from his eyes.

"Caution and common sense, Bones. Do we have any?"

Brennan stared out the windshield as her resolve began to flag. The snow _was_ starting to pick up, and they weren't even to the cabin yet. Still, they were practically there. All that tedious, unpleasant driving, the litany of passive-aggressive comments she had endured for most of the day, for nothing.

Angrily tossing the map in the backseat she closed her eyes, an unexplained lump suddenly forming deep inside her throat.

"If you want to go back Booth, feel free to turn around" she said dejectedly, capitulating to the meteorological realities. "I've already come to terms with the fact that we won't get to Snell's cabin today. We'll have to come back Tuesday when conditions have improved, assuming this road is accessible by then."

She didn't know she was pouting, and that's exactly what made the expression on the rosy mouth with its protruding, slightly quivering lower lip so blastedly effective.

Curse and damn his fate, Booth thought.

Never in the whole history of the Seeley Booth/Temperance Brennan partnership had the FBI agent been able to stand up to that little-girl-accidentally-left-behind-at-the-store look of hers, and it sure as hell wasn't going to happen now.

"You're going to be really disappointed if we don't make it there today, aren't you?" he asked gently.

Brennan, pretending not to care but realizing she was probably doing it poorly because for some unfathomable reason she _did_ care, shrugged her shoulders in what she hoped passed for insouciance.

"It's alright, Booth. This clearly unproductive journey has already taken up enough of your time. Let's just drive to your game and forget about Snell for today."

It was stupid to get teary eyed over such a minor setback, but even so, Brennan felt the rims of her eyes begin to sting. She turned away from her partner, trying to sniff back tears before he had the chance to notice the uncharacteristic moment of weakness. Her second one of the day, to boot. It's just that for a minute there, this adventure of theirs had seemed like it was taking them somewhere; somewhere that wasn't just going to be a scene of murder and mayhem. An idiotic assumption, because that's exactly where they'd been heading-that, or a hockey game.

And now, back to square one. Although she acknowledged that in all probability they had never actually left that starting position.

Booth inspected his insanely pretty, misty-eyed companion carefully and then he smiled.

"Hey, what the hell. We're already here, right? And that trail has to be close-a park ranger can't be wrong. Especially not a guy with a name like Ranger Rick. Let's just keep looking for a little while longer. How's that, Bones? The road's got to be around here somewhere."

"How about caution and common sense?"

"Eh-who needs those? Not Seeley Booth and Temperance Brennan, that's who" he intoned cheerfully. "We're so good together we can afford to throw common sense out the window."

Her face lit up immediately, exactly as if he'd just given her a bouquet of withered ulnas for her birthday. And that's all he ever wanted, right there in that smile.

And Brennan _was_ smiling; how could she not?

Booth-so charming, so devastatingly sweet, she conceded as her downtrodden spirits began to lift. Underneath the cocky attitude, the impossible amounts of swagger and the occasional thorn or two, nothing but sweetness and charm. One of the many reasons she was so irrationally drawn to her partner on all levels-physical, emotional, and maybe even spiritual, not that she necessarily even believed in the existence of the latter.

All those surprising contradictions that somehow defined Special Agent Seeley Joseph Booth; that kept her guessing and coming back for more as she unsuccessfully tried to decipher the mystery that lay at the heart of the former Ranger.

Well that, along with his undeniably impressive physical attributes. Brennan belatedly bit the inside of her cheek to try to keep a suspicious grin off her lips.

"What?" he asked, looking befuddled.

"Nothing. It's just that sometimes you _are_ extremely nice. I don't like bringing it up very often because I know it might only encourage you to have an even higher opinion of yourself than you already have, but it's true."

After mulling over the compliment, Booth turned to Brennan with a tilt of the head and his signature grin. "Yeah-you're right. I _am_ nice."

The peaceful interlude, like many others before it, wasn't meant to last.

"And _that's_ precisely why I didn't want to mention it. Booth, there's a raccoon in the middle of the road-please pay more attention to where you're going!"

Booth uttered a mild swear word as swerved around the lumbering animal, missing it by a hair.

He sped on for a couple of miles more until his partner, who was purposefully refusing to flatter her coworker any further now that she'd gotten her way, held out her hand and pointed to an almost invisible opening in the woods. The words 'no trespassing, private land' had been hand-written on a sign tacked onto a rusty chain which ran between two beat-up metal poles flanking the entrance.

"There, I believe that might be the road to the victim's cabin" Brennan announced. "The location approximates the one Mr. Rick drew out for us."

Pulling over and getting out of the car, Booth eyed the otherwise unmarked trail warily; at least the ground was mostly frozen, he consoled himself. Trying to traverse that glorified donkey path in the mud, in this stupid go-cart, would be impossible.

"You sure you want to do this?" he asked as Brennan joined him by the side of the road.

"Last chance; once we're on this thing, we're kind of committed to it. I think Ranger Rick might be right. It doesn't look like there's much room to U-turn it, probably not until the very end."

_"Until the very end..."_

Those very austere-sounding words began to register slowly inside the anthropologist's brain.

Was she committed? _Was she?_ Yes, she was.

"I _do_ want to do this, Booth" she replied, mirroring almost word for word her grave assertion about their hockey game earlier that morning. "And I understand what you're saying; once we embark on this venture, there's no room for regrets. I know that."

Again, there was a vehemence to her voice that made Booth wonder what the heck they were talking about. Was this last minute escapade of theirs just one big metaphor for their relationship of late? If so, that might very well be his missing silver lining-loopy park rangers, errant raccoons and all.

"You heard what Mr. Rick said," she reminded him. "The cabin's already in a state of advanced decay; if we wait much longer, there may be nothing left for us to examine."

A statement that could also describe their chances at a relationship, Brennan noted.

Somebody had to push this unwieldly behemoth along and Booth and his almost unnatural shyness when it came to making a move were quite obviously not up to the task. While she too had suffered from the stinging pain brought on by romantic rejection, she supposed he'd been turned down way more times, possibly instilling in him a lifelong fear of proposals of any kind.

So perhaps forward movement was entirely up to her.

After checking Brennan's expression for any signs of waffling, Booth made her stand behind him. He pulled his gun out of its holster and fired. A single shot propelled an ancient lock in a dozen directions, leaving the chain slack and the path clear.

The agent looked at the broken fragments while he considered this very strange day so replete with odd conversations. He decided that before he got back into the car he simply _had_ to be sure about things, although at this point he wasn't sure what it was he had to be sure about.

"You _positive_ about this?" he asked, twin rising eyebrows underscoring the importance of both his question and her answer.

"Positive," she said.

An accompanying luminous smile-not entirely partnery, not entirely friendshippy, made countless candy-colored balloons take flight within the special agent's chest.

Rubbing his hands together enthusiastically Booth smiled back, suddenly feeling invincible.

"Okay-we're doing this then" he announced.

The travelers got back inside their vehicle and the engine hummed quietly to life.

The car, a little unsteadily, a little wobbly perhaps began to creep forward rather slowly, but forward it crept.


	5. Lights Out

The drive was no more pleasant than the first view of the road had given anyone cause to expect.

At a snail's pace, Booth inched his way up one steep hill and down another, living almost entirely off the breaks as the windshield wipers continued their repetitive wheezing noise. After a nearly 40 minute drive-which was beginning to feel an awful lot like a life sentence-he was about to declare to his partner and to the world in general that they were royally f-ed, when Brennan stretched out her hand and yelped excitedly.

"There, I see it! It must be Snell's cabin."

His face fell in disappointment even as hers glowed with the unmistakeable thrill of the hunt.

"Cabin? That's it? _That's_ what we drove all the way out here for? More like a glorified outhouse."

"There you go again with your use of hyperboles. It contains at least 45 square meters of living space; more than adequate for a single individual of ascetic tastes, and certainly palatial when compared to the vast majority of dwellings in developing nations."

"It looks nasty, just like Ranger Rick said" Booth retorted, taking in the dirty, cracked windows along with the peeling roof shingles.

"Don't be so judgmental."

Brennan's pithy rebuke came more out of a built-in need to spar with her metaphorical other half than anything else because in its current condition, the place did indeed look execrable even to her.

"Besides, it can't be an outhouse; the outhouse appears to be over there, by the remains of that shed" she said, singling out two disintegrating buildings on the other side of the steep ravine running parallel to the house.

A shifty-looking, slatted rope bridge closed the dizzying gap yawning wide just below.

"You're kidding me. The bathroom's on the other side of that catwalk? How the hell are you supposed to get there in the middle of the night, especially in this kind of weather?"

"I'm sure he used a receptacle to relieve himself, the equivalent of a western chamber pot. Many people all over the world still rely on those as a means of temporary sanitation; not everyone has access to indoor plumbing. The urine and excrement could be disposed of the following day."

"Okay, I didn't need to know that" Booth grimaced, as a truly unpleasant image lodged itself inside his brain.

Damn that woman and her endless supply of trivia.

"Hope he got rid of his last effort before he left," he muttered.

"Or was murdered" Brennan added softly, examining the property and its solitary setting.

So maybe the place _was_ a little underwhelming she conceded, but on the plus side the snow seemed to have subsided a bit, which meant that they wouldn't miss Booth's game and she wouldn't have to hear his irate ramblings all the way back to Washington.

The pair got out of the car and walked in tandem towards the main building. Just as they neared the front door, Booth drew out his weapon and signaled for his partner to stay behind him.

"Why the gun?" Brennan asked, looking unimpressed. "What are the realistic odds that someone killed Snell and is now hiding in his cabin? The place appears to be deserted; I see no signs of recent habitation."

"Maybe another hermit bumped him off and then moved in."

"And drove all the way to Washington to dispose of the body?"

Drowning his mental commentary in well-practiced fortitude, Booth issued a steely 'shhh...' in Brennan's general direction.

The agent knocked first and, receiving no answer, gently jiggled the doorknob only to confirm that the door was locked. A slight bump from his linebacker shoulders was all that was needed for the flimsy wood panel to immediately give way.

Once inside the house, Booth and Brennan were greeted by a doom-and-gloom interior that reeked of disuse and more than a strong whiff of must and which, overall, closely mirrored the facade's sorry state.

It was entirely possible that Snell's retreat might have possessed a certain cozy, homey charm at one time.

But it's glory days-whenever they'd been, if they'd ever existed at all-were far behind it. A thin layer of dirt clung to every visible surface and the threadbare cushions on one of the few pieces of furniture in the joint living/dining space, a worn-out couch, were positively menacing in appearance, looking like they were about ready to spontaneously combust.

A sterno cooking lamp on top of a small cabinet and a bucket in the corner appeared to comprise the entire scope of the adjacent kitchen area.

"_Now_ you still think I'm being judgmental? The place is a pigsty."

"The layout and proportions as well as the quality of the original building materials can't be faulted" Brennan said, appreciative of the quaint brickwork of the fireplace and the thick, handsome wooden beams mortared on top of one another which still held up nicely despite the obvious lack of recent upkeep. "I believe it's an actual log cabin hewn by hand and not a prefabricated model, perhaps dating to the mid-nineteenth century."

She turned to Booth with a puzzled look.

"Why are you still holding your gun?"

"Because the door to what I assume is the bedroom is closed and there could be someone hiding in there," he whispered.

Although he could barely able make out her features, Booth could well imagine his skeptical partner rolling her eyes in contempt.

He made his way to the only other room in the house.

Opening the door cautiously, the agent quickly scanned the area. Empty, as far as the inky shadows would allow him to see. A tiny, depressing, bare-bones space with a ratty looking bed and a major draft blowing through it. His flashlight picked up shards of glass on the floor and, aimed higher, eventually revealed a partially broken windowpane right above the small pile of debris.

A weird rustling sound coming from somewhere near the bed led Booth to grip his gun tighter, and he automatically stepped in front of his partner to shield her from any possible harm.

"FBI," he announced in a booming voice. "Come out with your hands in the air where I can see them."

Given the setting, the former Ranger had fully expected a serial killer or perhaps even the creature from the black lagoon to be gunning for them at any moment. Instead, a compact beast with a long, hairless tail and pointy fangs suddenly skittered across the floor right past his feet, its eyes glowing neon yellow in the flashlight.

Booth let out an unmanly squeal as he jumped back, almost landing on his companion's foot. The equally spooked animal leapt out the broken window and headed for an evergreen bush outside while Brennan followed its hurried path with her uv light.

"I believe you can put your gun away now unless you feel a need to give chase to the intruder. This would be a first for the FBI, I believe; arresting a marsupial on suspicion of murder. Would you like me to call for backup?"

"You're just a barrel of laughs today, Bones."

As his heart rate returned to normal it occurred to Booth that it was truly fortunate his partner didn't have a penchant for gossip; an incident like this could follow him around the Hoover for the rest of his career. The kind of legendary story that dogged other hapless agents well past their retirement and which was routinely mined for cheap laughs at holiday parties.

He shuddered.

_Hey, remember when Agent Booth almost brought in a 'possum for questioning?_

He holstered his weapon and took a closer look at the broken glass, noting a single loose stone by the wall.

"This wasn't a break-in; I think some hikers were having fun and threw a rock through the window. The hole is too small for a person."

"Well, at least the wildlife is making good use of Snell's cabin" Brennan interjected drily.

With her light clamped between her teeth, the anthropologist dug deep into her purse and pulled out a small glass vial and a swab, ripping off their respective wrappings. She crouched down and took a sample of some unknown substance off the floor and then patiently waited for the results of her test as Booth watched her in silence.

"Well?"

"I'm almost certain that there's organic matter on the floor, but so far it isn't blood; probably animal urine and feces."

"_Great_-more of _that_. This day just keeps on giving."

"There are a number of other areas I'd like to examine, but it's too dark in here for me to be able to do a thorough job. Perhaps you could turn on the headlights in my car and point the vehicle towards the cabin. Even moderate amounts of additional illumination would be helpful."

Booth looked at his watch.

"Bones..."

"The sooner I can dismiss any potential evidence as superfluous, the sooner we can leave and head to your game" she declared in an exasperated tone. "We're already here."

He knew exactly how this argument was going to end; why fight it?

The browbeaten man marched back out into the frozen tundra with pursed lips, his stiffening fingers folded into each other to ward off the cold.

Married life. Is this what it was all about, Booth wondered moodily? Next thing he knew she'd be asking him to take out the trash and drive the kids to their soccer-nix that-hockey match.

Kids. With Bones.

_Stop that-right now,_ he chastised his wandering psyche, unable to keep from smiling like an idiot even with the dire warning. _You haven't even asked her out on a date yet and you're already thinking about having kids with her._

Apparently, the weather wasn't the only thing with a case of the crazies in Pennsylvania.

"You happy?" he snorted as he stomped back into the bedroom.

The alcove was now overrun by strange shadows as the bright lights from the car filtered through the lone, multi-paned window, bouncing off walls and furniture at odd angles.

Brennan glossed over her coworker's peevish tone and informed him that yes-while still not creating for optimal working conditions-the lighting was much better now, and thank you.

"Hey" Booth began. "Have you looked at your phone recently? I don't think we have service out here."

The anthropologist wasn't the least bit captivated by the news.

"I can't imagine we'll need to make a call within the next half hour" she replied, shrugging her shoulders with disinterest. "By the way, I think there are some papers stuck between the dresser and the wall. You might want to look at them while I keep testing for blood. The absence of any other paperwork in the bedroom suggests that those might have fallen accidentally; they might be important."

Booth leaned over and plucked the papers out gingerly, doing his best to avoid a network of sticky cobwebs. A quick perusal of the loose sheets revealed them to be parts of a real estate contract though most of the document, including the all-important front and end pages with the names of purchaser and seller, were missing.

He was skimming through the stack of mumbo-jumbo legalese when the room suddenly went black.

Not totally black because some residual ambient light was still being reflected inwards by the snow, but black enough that it immediately made Booth's blood run cold.

On instinct, the agent cannonballed himself out the bedroom and through the cabin door as Brennan stared from her crouched position. He ran towards the car as if his life depended on it, which he knew it very well might, making a point to reconnect with Jesus along the way just in case.

Too late; maybe the prayers should have come sooner.

Because unlike earlier that afternoon when he only _thought_ they were in trouble, _this_ time they were screwed for sure.


	6. Til Death

When Brennan finally caught up with him, Booth was already getting out of the car, its key swinging from his fingertips with a studied nonchalance the anthropologist found baffling.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

Booth slouched against the door and gave her a long look through flinty, hard eyes before announcing flatly,

"It's dead, Bones."

The tone had very little obvious emotion built into it but there was definitely more than a ripple of menace crackling just beneath its deceptively quiet surface.

"What's dead?"

"The battery."

The danger grew, as a single doubting eyebrow curved upwards into the agent's forehead.

"Isn't this supposed to be a new set of wheels?"

Brennan immediately took issue with both the nature of the question and what it implied about her intelligence. Did he really think she wouldn't have the wherewith-all to be able to tell a new car from an old one?

"Of course it's new."

"Tell me you at least have one of those portable battery starters in the trunk."

"No. Why would I even own one? It's a _brand new_ vehicle."

"Alrighty, then," Booth snorted. "Anything like an On-Star whatever button we can at least press to beam us out of here? I think it might still work even without the phone."

"If you're referring to the satellite roadside assistance package, it was offered to me by the salesperson but I declined it."

"Why, in God's name?"

"It was an additional expense with a recurring monthly charge."

"You're a zillionaire, and you skimped a few bucks on something _that_ important?"

"_Zillion_ is not a real number, Booth, and wealth isn't an excuse for frivolous spending. Not that I believe I owe you any kind of explanation, but I didn't think I needed that type of service. Aside from the fact that I don't like the idea of my every movement being monitored by unknown parties, I rarely leave the DC metropolitan area where cellphone connection is readily available in case of emergencies. And assuming I were ever incapacitated during a collision, in a busy urban area like Washington someone would eventually alert the authorities about my plight."

"And yet here we are in the middle of Nowheresville, Pennsylvania with a broken down car and without a single bar of reception on either of our phones" Booth replied sarcastically, in a downright condescending manner Brennan was really starting to not at all appreciate.

"Are you certain that's the problem? Perhaps you're looking at the wrong mechanical component, or you didn't turn it on right. The ignition can be somewhat tricky. You have to push the brakes while you..."

"It's dead," Booth insisted more vehemently. "I know cars, and I know when a car battery's dead. Besides, I've been driving the thing all day; I think I know how to turn it on by now. Accept it-it's dead as a doornail, Bones."

A crinkle appeared at the top of Brennan's nose, smack dab between her eyes.

"That's simply not possible" she countered. "The lights weren't on long enough for such a huge energy drain on the battery to occur. I still believe you made a mistake-you should check again."

Booth finally exploded, fed up with the arrogant, smarter-than-thou attitude he felt his partner had been lording over him all day.

"Will you stop doing that? Arguing with me on everything? Can't you just admit for once in your life that you're wrong and that I'm right? Why is that so hard?"

He knew he was yelling at the top of his lungs but he was cold, miserably cold, his back was wailing in spasms of pain, and their ride was a goner. And as if all _that_ weren't enough to drive even the sanest man to the brink of doing something crazy, it was now a sure thing that he wasn't going to make it to his game.

"I think you should..."

"Stop dissecting this, Bones-it's over! Just give it up, already. I don't need a genius following me around and second-guessing everything I do; what I need right now is a jump start from a tow-truck!" he barked, his cheeks flushing pink with anger. He took a step closer to his slack-jawed companion without giving any thought to how she might feel about the sudden close physical proximity.

It was a move he immediately regretted.

She seemed to have been caught completely off guard both by the harshness of the tone and the abrupt invasion of her personal space, looking back at her partner with leery eyes through the shadow cast by his towering frame. In fact, Booth swore she looked downright scared.

Yeah-he was sure. For the first time since he'd known her, she looked scared.

Of him.

His entire body grew rigid as a stifling avalanche of images-dad screaming, mom silent, apologetic, two terrified kids waiting for all hell to break loose-came off that mountain of willful oblivion he'd tried building around it.

_Christ! Christ!_ his mind hissed accusingly, whipping his conscience until it bled.

An icy pall fell over his features as his normally olive complexion bleached away to bone-white. He instinctively took a step backwards to give her some breathing room, hoping like mad it'd be enough.

"I'm sorry, Bones. I'm sorry."

Watching Booth flinch and retreat, Brennan was left to wonder about the panic-stricken nature of the apology. Yes, he was being an idiot, but it certainly wasn't something she couldn't handle.

A brief moment of introspection in which she reviewed every pertinent piece of information she had on him, mainly from Pops and Sweets, eventually gave her a likely answer; his overblown reaction was probably the domestic abuse equivalent of PTSD. He'd mistaken her surprise at his anger for fear and now he was feeling remorseful.

It made her cringe just to think about the things he'd lived through to make him so self-conscious about displaying his temper in front of friends. It was bad enough for a child to fear reprisals from strangers, Brennan thought mournfully, as only one who'd been in that type of situation would know. But from one's parents in one's own home?

The inherent horror of that was heartbreaking.

"You don't have to look so worried, Booth" she offered reassuringly, brushing off the incident with a slight shake of the head. She held on to his brown irises with her unwavering, trusting indigo ones as she reached for his arm.

She wanted to make him understand that what had just transpired between them was only a fight and that no lines had been crossed. That there was nothing even remotely inappropriate or menacing about his behavior.

Galling, irritating, childish? Yes-definitely; all of the above.

Inappropriate? No.

"I'm not afraid of you," Brennan said without hesitation.

It was true, every word. She'd never felt as safe with anyone as she did with the FBI agent, not just physically but emotionally. Their latest argument hadn't changed that in the least.

Booth smiled, but only halfheartedly.

The faith-and he could only describe it as faith-his partner so obviously had in his self-control and his inherent human decency was nothing short of miraculous, and with that reassuring revelation his breathing slowly started to return back to normal.

"Still, I'm sorry Bones."

"I suppose you're entitled to be angry under the circumstances, Booth-even if I didn't particularly enjoy all the irrational expostulating. I shouldn't have insisted that you turn the headlights on. In hindsight, it was a poor judgment call on my part, especially considering the unfortunate position we now find ourselves in."

Booth looked away and sighed, cool enough now to accept his share of the blame for the debacle.

"I'm the dumbass who thinks he knows everything about cars and left them on. Come to think of it" he said, whacking the car door shut behind him, "it's the dealer's fault for selling you a lemon. When we get back, I'm going to give him a personal earful."

"How _do_ we get back?"

That, Booth agreed, was the burning question of the day, wasn't it?

The wind kept hammering ice pellets into their exposed faces as they spoke and Booth made the executive decision that a civilized hashing out of their few options was best left for indoors. It certainly wasn't going to do them _or_ their flaring emotions any good to lose a finger or a nose to frostbite.

"Here, Bones; we should go back to Snell's cabin. At least we'll be out of the wind."

Actually, lack of wind turned out to be about the only material comfort the ramshackle structure provided. With their professional duties no longer acting as a distraction, both partners quickly realized that it was as cold in there as it was outside. Something they'd both conveniently overlooked during their previous incursion when a return to warmer, more civilized accommodations was a God-given birthright, not a luxury.

"Maybe we should go back to the car to have this discussion," Brennan suggested. "There's probably still some residual heat left in there. It won't last very long, but it might buy us an extra hour or two."

Booth shook his head, rejecting the idea outright. He'd been in this kind of weather before, stuck in a broken humvee in the middle of a firefight in a far-flung Afghani mountain range, and he knew that the hour or two of warmth she was calculating for them was probably far too generous of an estimate.

"If we sit there too long, we might have trouble making it back here" he replied, looking down at Brennan's feet and zeroing in on her high-heeled, treadless boots.

"The temperature in this cabin is most likely lower than it is inside my car, at least for now. I trust your professional acumen, you should trust mine."

"Yeah, but you know what the cabin has that the car doesn't?" Booth asked. "A fireplace, that's what."

Brennan cast a defaming eye over the crumbling brick enclosure with it's buckling mantelpiece and what looked like an old rat's nest wedged underneath an iron log cradle. The whole ensemble might be nostalgically quaint, but that didn't make it safe.

"Booth, the chimney is almost certainly blocked, if the building's current state of deterioration at all mirrors the condition of its few amenities which we should assume for safety's sake it does. Attempting to start a fire in there might actually result _in_ a fire, one that burns down the entire structure. We can't afford to destroy whatever evidence might still be here."

"_Destroy evidence? _This case is going to end up with _three_ dead bodies, Bones; donut guy, you and me. We can wait all you want but if push comes to shove, we're not going to have much choice about using that fireplace. We might have to spend the night here; maybe a lot longer than that. And assuming that happens, we're going to have to take a few risks if we don't want to freeze our butts off. Can't make a fire without things getting a little dangerous, right?"

"I still think we should consider our other options first. What is your unbiased assessment of our situation as a former Army Ranger?"

"You mean, how bad is it?"

She nodded.

"That depends-did you tell anyone at work that you were coming out here? Because as far as everyone at the FBI thinks, I snuck out early to go to Idaho and I won't be in the office until Tuesday, earliest."

A strange, queasy feeling began snaking its way into Brennan's stomach.

"No; I'm one of the highest ranking members of the Jeffersonian's staff. In my position, you don't generally have to account for your whereabouts with any detail."

"Maybe someone will miss you at your conference."

"I registered at the last minute because I wasn't sure I could get away from the lab until late this week. And with the storm, I find it highly unlikely that either the hotel's management or the conference organizers will bother contacting me about not showing up. They'll most likely assume that I-along with possibly hundreds of other travelers-cancelled my plans due to the blizzard."

"The Jeffersonian?"

"Everyone there knew I was going to Baltimore-even if they made any effort to reach me and failed they would probably blame it on the weather. How about you? You're always getting work calls; if you're not returning them promptly or answering your texts, it might raise an alarm."

"Between my dying aunt..."

"Uncle," she corrected. "See, you already made a mistake."

"Whatever. Between that and the retreat everyone's going to be at, I don't think too many people are going to be looking for me."

"Rebecca?" Brennan asked hopefully.

Booth's disdainful chuckle reverberated throughout the empty room.

"Child support check is in, she's dealing with Parker and his mono, and she didn't file her taxes on time. Don't think I'll be on her speed-dial roster anytime this weekend."

"Won't she be wondering why you didn't call to see how Parker was doing?"

"Nah-it's not like I'm going to get brownie-points for always being on top of things with him for years on end. I can see her chalking me up not calling to not wanting to take Parker off her hands. Hey, how about Angela?"

Brennan shook her head dispiritedly.

"She and Hodgins were boarding a train to New York this morning to take advantage of the unofficial three-day weekend. Angela said it was a last gasp for freedom before the baby arrives. I can't imagine that she'll be thinking about me."

Booth surveyed the increasingly blurry surroundings lurking just outside before taking in the interior of the cabin with the sharp eyes of a seasoned survivor.

"So what you're telling me here is that between the two of us we don't have a _single_ person who's going to miss us until Tuesday, earliest."

"Maybe one of your hundreds of friends," Brennan offered lightly.

"Har har, Bones. Nice time for us to discover you actually _have_ a sense of humor. I'm not joking here" he continued, sounding genuinely disconcerted. "No one's even going to know we're missing for three, maybe four days and once they do they won't know where to begin looking. And you heard what the ranger said-the road through the park could be closed for a week, maybe longer. By the time the FBI realizes they need to track us down we'll be looking like ice sculptures at a wedding buffet."

"Stop exaggerating, Booth."

When the agent didn't ping-pong the comment back in his typically adroit manner Brennan's face fell, as awareness of just how bad their predicament must actually be started to sink in. If Booth, who was both incredibly resourceful and an inveterate optimist seemed to be so concerned, then maybe they were indeed in a heap of trouble.

"This isn't just another one of your hyperboles," she said, a flash of worry suddenly undermining her usually bullet-proof nerves. "Maybe we can walk back to the main road? Surely there will still be park maintenance vehicles driving by. We might at least be able to get cellphone service there."

Booth pried open the door and saw nothing but a moving sheet of white, now quickly turning an impenetrable gray as what little was left of the day gave way to night. And then he looked at his partner's outerwear, this time more critically-thin overcoat, cute mittens and hat, fashionable boots. An ensemble meant to take her from her condo to the Jeffersonian and back and not through a slog across miles of wooded, hilly terrain with more than a foot of snow already on the ground.

Sure, his own clothes and shoes were little better, but they were still better.

"Listen, Bones" he offered, sounding torn. "I think you should wait here. I'll trek my way back to the main road. As soon as I spot some help I'll come back and get you."

Brennan's brow furrowed as she instantly took issue with the suggestion. Sending her partner into white-out conditions alone, where he could stumble down one of those steep inclines they had just skirted and freeze to death? Not even close to being an acceptable option.

"Absolutely not."

"Bones, I've gone through survival training; I did stuff like this all the time in the army. I didn't want to scare you before but things aren't looking too good for us right now. Trust me; this might be our best shot-maybe our _only_ shot-at getting out of here alive. And I gotta go _now_, before the weather gets worse."

"I do trust you, but you're not leaving me here. You could slide down a ravine and break your leg, or lose your way in the dark. And you might have gone through survival training, but you're not outfitted for this type of weather any better than I am. Either we go seek help together or we remain here together. We're partners-in everything that matters, Booth. And that includes life-or-death situations."

"'Til death do us part" he said a little sadly, and then waited for the fight to begin. To his shock, there was none.

"Yes."

"You're making this awfully complicated, Bones."

"Actually, I believe I've just made it incredibly simple. We stay or we go. Together. It doesn't get any more basic than that."

"_Fine!_" Booth hissed, after a long minute of internal debate. "We'll stay. But if we turn into ice-cubes in this stupid shack, I'm blaming _you_."

In some ways he was happy Bones had given him no choice in the matter because the prospect of being separated from her, not knowing for hours whether she was alright or not by herself in this pathetic excuse for a hut, wasn't exactly a reassuring one.

"If things don't turn out well I'll make sure to issue you an apology from the afterlife, which I hope you realize doesn't really exist so I won't actually be providing you with any," Brennan retorted. "Here, at least let me go get my emergency kit out of the trunk, just in case."

The agent escorted his partner to her car and then the couple made their way back to the cabin in morose silence, each party adamant that the other was being mule-headed and unreasonable.

Confined together to yet another cramped space in yet another raging blizzard.

Except that where once there were the occasional teeth-grinding interferences from Sweets and the theoretical prospect of some horrible epidemic hanging over their heads to look forward to, now it was the very real possibility of turning into human popsicles instead.


	7. Baby Light My Fire

Brennan decided to wait until she and Booth had reached Snell's run-down home before offering any more advice. The vicious assault of scouring sleet had indeed picked up considerably and like her companion seconds earlier, the scientist came to the inevitable conclusion that further attempts at an outdoor conversation were more than likely to result in another shouting match and even more bitter recriminations.

"We should have stayed in the car" she grumbled as they trotted back inside, her breath forming a ghostly ring around her mouth. "You were the one who wanted to come back to the cabin rather than walk to the main road in search of help, like I suggested. What do you propose we do now?"

Lips set in a thin, tight line and hands fisted deep into the pockets of her coat suggested that the anthoplogist felt more than just a passing degree of animosity towards the survival strategy she and her partner had so acrimoniously chosen. Taken all together, the pose telegraphed "this idea stinks" with such clarity that Booth was finally forced to shift his thoughts away from the indisputable crappiness of their defunct vehicle to donut guy's Siberian pigsty.

His eyes cased the interior of the house and then narrowed as they honed in on the scientist's dour face.

"The fireplace" he stated grimly, squaring his shoulders in preparation for another battle.

"Booth..."

"I'm sorry, Bones. I know you think it's too risky and that it might potentially destroy evidence, but let's face it, we really don't have too many other choices. It's already freezing in here and things aren't going to get any warmer. You heard the weatherman on the radio; the temperature's supposed to drop another twenty degrees tonight. We're stuck in the hellhole _you_ insisted on dragging us to, and we might as well make the best of it. Just think of it as your own 'romantic nook in the Poconos'" he added snidely, still baffled as to how Ranger Rick could have possibly mistaken the two of _them_ for a honeymooning couple.

And looking for a 'love nest,' no less.

_Honeymoon_ _my butt _Booth groaned inwardly, giving Brennan a sidelong glance. Far closer to the unmitigated horrors of World War I trench warfare than your usual post-connubial shenanigans. Welded at the hip for what might be days-or God forbid maybe even an entire week-to a pugnacious, surly companion; a bathroom break that required channeling one's inner Indiana Jones; and potentially rabid wildlife running rampant through their living quarters.

_'Possums_.

He wondered offhandedly how the Capitals were faring.

In a fit of piqué, Brennan slid the backpack with their supplies off her shoulders and flung it on top of the squalid couch. The patent aggression behind the throw gave life to a cluster of downy particles, causing them to burst upwards from the upholstery into the air in a perfect imitation of a diminutive mushroom cloud.

"Fine!" she barked defensively, irked by this newest reminder that it had indeed been _her_ idea to search Snell's cabin and that _her_ single-mindedness when it came to the pursuit of truth and justice was perhaps the primary reason they now found themselves in this calamitous predicament.

She parried the flashlight into Booth's ribs hard and saw him wince.

"Owww! What was _that_ for?"

"Here-take this; you're going to need it. Before we do anything else we should at a very minimum ascertain that the damper is open and the chimney isn't blocked. Please kneel down and look up the flue."

"What? Me?" Booth asked, almost gagging as he stared at the thick layers of dirt and other highly questionable gunk stuck to the floor. "Bones, this is a brand new wool coat" he pleaded, holding out one of the onyx-colored lapels for emphasis. "_Brand new" _he repeated, as if that irrelevant factoid might somehow absolve him from any responsibility he might otherwise have of checking on the safety of his plan.

He poked at her own coat with his index finger and smiled unctuously.

"You've had that one a while. Can _you_ do it?"

After giving Booth a look so virulent it should have come with a pair of rubber gloves and a bottle of disinfectant, the anthropologist ripped the flashlight back out of the agent's hand and went down on all fours, twisting her frame awkwardly so she could get a better view of the possible challenges they were up against. As she peered up the chimney stack a shower of debris came down on her face, a mishap that did little to improve her already radioactive mood.

Nothing-she saw absolutely nothing, other than the typical detritus one might expect in a chimney that had gone unused for a while.

She blinked some of the dirt in her eyes away as Booth, who'd been unconsciously gazing at the shapely contours of his coworker's derriere-discernible even through jeans and a coat-helped her to her feet.

"The damper is definitely open, but that's all I can state with any degree of confidence. I didn't detect any type of ambient light at the top, though. Perhaps ice and snow are blocking the exit. Once combustion begins whatever occlusion is covering the crown of the chimney might simply melt. We'll have to leave the front door open for a while when the flames are stable in order to create an up-draft. That way smoke can rise and not flood the living room, assuming the entire building hasn't caught on fire by then and caved in around us."

"Sounds doable" Booth replied distractedly, brushing some dirt off Brennan's coat. He stopped short of messing with her hair, wisely concluding that under the circumstances, the innocent gesture might be misinterpreted as condescension and as such might earn him a justified swatting.

She batted his hand away anyway.

"Door open so so the heat can rise. Got it."

A suspicious smile appeared on Brennan's face.

"Also to keep us from dying from carbon monoxide poisoning" she added maliciously, just to see her partner's reaction.

It was a good one. Obviously, the idea of suffocating to death was not something he'd given much thought to when he tried selling her on the fireplace scheme.

Irrespective of these new and awful dangers, Booth was determined to move ahead.

"I still say we go for it. Remember, can't make a fire without the risk of getting burned."

"You already said that. I wish you would stop..."

"_Truce, truce_!" Booth called out, placing his hands in front of him to form a cross as if he were fending off a hungry vampire instead of a crotchety colleague. "We need to work together on this-we're _partners _Bones, remember? Listen...I'm sorry about before, when I said this was all your fault. That wasn't very fair of me, and it also wasn't true. You were just being you, diligent and conscientious and scientific and all those other good things that make our country great."

As was often the case, Brennan took the overdone apology with a grain of salt.

"Enough Booth; I'm duly mollified."

"And just to make you feel better about my plan, I'm going to keep a bucket of snow on standby in case things get out of hand with the fireplace. How's _that _for safety," he offered with a smile.

In the interest of maintaining their perishable new accord Brennan refrained from pointing out that a bucket of snow at floor level wasn't going to help them any if the roof overhead was accidentally set ablaze.

"Fine, I'll do it," she announced tersely. She grabbed the backpack off the sofa and went back down on her knees.

"You gonna do some wizardy thing and rub two sticks together?"

"Noooo. I have a butane lighter in my emergency kit, although I'm certainly capable of starting a fire without it. However, there's only a small amount kindling here; it probably won't sustain combustion for more than an hour, if we're fortunate."

Booth pointed to the small backpack with disdain.

"You don't have a battery starter in your car but you own a lighter even though you don't smoke?"

"Lighters can be quite handy, as our current misadventure illustrates."

"So are battery starters. What else do you keep inside that thing?"

"A box of granola bars, a first aid kit, a few bottles of water. Oh, also a toothbrush, toothpaste and some other toiletries. It's mainly an overnight bag."

Granola bars.

Great, Booth thought. Add that to the list of growing indignities he had to contend with. He made a note to self to stash some beef jerky in Bones' car for the future, just in case something like this ever happened again.

"At least we'll have good breath when the EMTs find our frozen bodies, huh?"

"I'm serious, Booth. What are we going to do about an energy source? I didn't see any lumber stacked outside the cabin. Wait" she said, cheering up slightly. "That shed on the other side of the ravine-the one by the outhouse. Snell might have stored wood there to keep it from getting wet since there's no porch around the house."

Her partner's jaw fell, and then his eyes rolled as far back into his head as they could possibly go.

"You're kidding me. _Of course_ the crazy old coot would keep his inventory there and not by the house. That way he could cozy up to a log every time he went to the john. Nothing I want to do more than cross that rope thingy carrying a bunch of heavy sticks."

"I'll help you. We'll need to get as much out of there as we can while we're still able to find our way. Once it gets dark, it will be almost impossible for us to safely navigate the route there and back."

"No" Booth retorted firmly, but not before giving his expensive coat a mournful farewell caress. Bottom line, partnership and gender equality only went so far, and right _here_ was where the train stopped.

"No way. You trying to give me a heart attack, Bones? With those girly-girl shoes on that thing? Nope-that's pretty much the same as suicide. You stay here and get the fire started. _I'll_ go."

Brennan fixed the stubborn agent with an indifferent eye. If Booth wanted to operate by some anachronistic chivalry code and do twice the work, fine by her. This was _his_ idea, after all.

She began arranging small branches and the empty rat's nest into a pyramid shape inside the firebox.

"Suit yourself. Just don't complain about your back-remember that I offered to help."

Booth left looking peeved but resigned and the scientist turned her attention back to her pyramid. Piling on more kindling, she cautiously set the bottom of the arrangement on fire with the lighter, her obdurate partner all but forgotten as a few promising flames weaved their way through the material.

The chore was tedious and required a great deal of concentration, which might explain why it took Brennan nearly fifteen minutes to notice that Booth had failed to return.

Even considering that he had to traverse the rope bridge with the utmost care and then deal with whatever locking mechanism might be on the shed he _really_ should have been back by now, Brennan reasoned. She was on the verge of abandoning the modest success of sparks and smoke in front of her to go looking for him when the door suddenly flew open with a loud bang_, _allowing a gust of cold wind and a maelstrom of snowflakes to sweep through the living room.

And at the center of this unlikely, wintry ticker-tape parade? Her partner, his nose bright red and runny, arms swamped by a haphazard collection of cobweb-encrusted logs.

_So much for his expensive outerwear_ Brennan thought wryly, making light of the dry leaves and wood splinters peppering his coat.

Booth kicked the door shut behind him with an ice-encrusted shoe and a grunt.

"Damn! That was dangerous" he snorted, trying to catch his breath. "What idiot makes life so hard for himself? Maybe the person who killed Snell was just putting him out of his misery. At least by getting murdered he probably went fast."

"It's lucky for us your errand was successful," his partner reflected. "If the shed had been empty, we'd be limited to burning the few pieces of furniture Snell possessed along with whatever loose planks we managed to pry off the cabin. It'd be almost impossible to gather any timber in this weather. Besides, even if we could somehow manage to cut down a tree, uncured wood is a very poor energy source; it contains far too much moisture to burn properly."

The agent dumped his cumbersome bundle by the fireplace and immediately headed back out.

"Sure you can't use any help?" Brennan asked.

Maybe it was the crimson face or the watery eyes, but for some reason she was starting to feel some faint rumblings of sympathy towards her coworker.

Booth shook his head morosely and lumbered out, looking vastly more unhappy than the first time he'd left on his mission. Apparently, chauvinistic paternalism exacted a steep price from its adherents.

The exercise was repeated several times, with each new offer of help being rebuffed more and more hesitantly by the increasingly bedraggled-looking agent. Were her shoes really _that_ bad, Booth asked himself, as a river of sweat ran down his spine and commingled with the cold air shooting up his coat to create a sensation of almost unspeakable misery.

But no-he wouldn't even consider it.

That catwalk was on its last legs, for sure. More than once he'd come close to losing his footing even though the rubber soles on his shoes were more than up to the task. If Bones went down and cracked her head open, how could he possibly live with himself?

He went back outside for the umpteenth time philosophically accepting that, all in all, it was probably better to feel miserable for an hour or two than to carry a boatload of guilt for the rest of his life.

Finding herself alone once again, Brennan blew on the crackling flames in the brick cavity while keeping an eye out for signs that the chimney might be blocked by something far more permanent than ice. Even with her foul mood she smiled at the rather stereotypical picture of prehistoric domesticity she and Booth made.

Cro-Magnon male out on the hunt, carrying out the perilous business of keeping his family alive while his female mate, more handy but perhaps less physically sturdy than he, remained home tending to the hearth inside their shelter. All they needed was for her belly to be swollen with Booth's progeny in order for the touching vignette to be ready for hanging in the entry hall of the Jeffersonian, or perhaps displayed as a diorama in the museum's Early Man wing.

Hah.

Pregnant with Booth's child.

Brennan mulled over a concept which, if she had to be honest, wasn't _entirely_ repellent.

She could totally envision Booth fussing over her-even more intensely protective and solicitous than usual-and then beaming with his typical exuberance once their child arrived. He was already an excellent father. More than likely he would also make an excellent mate to the right, if infinitely patient, woman.

So no, it didn't repel at all.

Besides, it's not as if she hadn't already actively considered being with Booth in a romantic sense before. They had even tiptoed around the issue not that long ago after his break-up with Hannah. But these latest set of images carried the phrase 'being with him' well beyond anything she'd ever given serious thought to.

Assuming they could ever get their act together as they had posited over beers and burning scraps of paper a few months before, would he eventually want them to move in together? Would he want to have children with her?

What would that brave new world even look like?

Not too bad she guessed, if her emergent 'gut feelings' were in any way to be trusted.

Brennan's expression gradually turned thoughtful and tender. Little by little and without really being all that aware that it was happening, the ball of light coming to life beneath her fingers had grown stronger and brighter, very much like her and Booth's relationship over the years.

And it was all wonderful. Miraculous, really, to use one of her partner's favorite adjectives.

With a grin she couldn't-_wouldn't_-fight Brennan blew softly on the embers, letting a host of other daydreams fill her with an unexpected sense of peace.

That was, until the happy reveries were cut short by a frantic, feral howl coming from outside the cabin walls.


	8. Karma

"_Dammit_!"

The agitated bellows coming from somewhere in the woods sounded an awful lot like Booth, except the voice uttering them was higher-pitched and much more expletive-laden than Brennan was used to.

"Owww, oww! Dammit! Christ!"

"Booth!" Brennan yelled back, jumping to her feet and sprinting out the door as a tight lasso of very real fear began to constrict her airways. Although daylight had become diluted to almost nothing, she could still see the snow-covered outhouse and the shed on the other side of the ravine. What she _couldn't_ see anywhere was her partner.

"Booth! Where are you!" she shouted, feeling increasingly anxious.

"Argh...that f-g hurts. Cold! Cold! Cold! Down here, Bones," the agent whimpered.

"Booth?"

Brennan checked the upper sides of the narrow chasm for signs of her coworker but she had to get closer, her eyes dip much lower, before she could find him.

The evidence seemed conclusive as to what had transpired just minutes ago. A few missing slats on the bridge had almost certainly cracked under Booth's weight, leaving him without footing. With an armload of supplies rendering his hands useless, he'd apparently been unable to catch himself on the ropes as he fell.

Not that those would have probably helped. Like everything else of Snell's-including his strangely misshapen, shrivelled remains-the brittle-looking strands of hemp too seemed on the brink of falling apart.

In all likelihood her partner had then part-rolled, part-slid all the way to the bottom of the drop, his body only ceasing its rapidly accelerating downward motion when it connected abruptly with the icy surface of the stream below. Unfortunately for him, there was still water running underneath the deceptively solid-looking silver ribbon and the liquid had gone on to drench him head-to-toe rather spectacularly.

Brennan began the tricky descent to reach him.

"Are you alright?" she asked breathlessly.

The sorry object of her concern found his footing before the scientist had a chance to make it to the bottom. Dripping wet, he stood up tottering a bit, his coat and suit covered in mud and leaves. His mouth was wide open but not a single syllable was coming out, vocal chords apparently frozen after the mishap.

At any other time, in any other weather, the pathetic visual of her stiff, waterlogged partner might have made Brennan snicker inwardly, if not out loud. Might have actually been almost comical she thought-something out of a vaudevillian slapstick revue from the silent movie era-the expression on his face was so exaggeratedly aghast.

But this most definitely wasn't one of those times.

Without a reliable source of heat at their rundown shelter or any other clothing options but the ones they had on, Booth could easily freeze to death if they didn't do something quickly. Brennan also prayed-figuratively, of course-that he hadn't broken any bones during the fall; the results of _that_ could be potentially catastrophic, particularly if his skin had been punctured in the process. Without access to antibiotics, a compound fracture could very rapidly lead to a case of blood poisoning.

And depending on how long they remained marooned that condition could easily prove to be as fatal as the loss of body heat. Sadly, Brennan conceded, neither hypothermia nor septicemia were appropriate subjects for ridicule.

"Do I _look_ like I'm alright?" he finally managed to squeak. "God, _God_, that's cold," he panted, awkwardly lumbering sideways like a crab up the sharp slope.

When Brennan offered him the use of her arm for support Booth automatically refused the help. He figured the very least he could do to try to salvage his frozen pride was to walk back to donut guy's old place-_their_ place now-under his own power.

Even when that meant limping painfully, and ever-so-slowly, all the way there.

By the time they reached their destination, Snell's home smelled comfortingly of wood smoke. Daylight had completely vanished and the coworkers were met by an interior that was almost pitch-black save for the gentle glow coming from the fireplace.

"Take off your clothes" Brennan commanded, intent on ameliorating whatever damage her partner had suffered.

Booth's eyes flew open.

"What! No way" he said through clenched teeth, looking terrified.

"You have to get out of those clothes," Brennan insisted. "They're going to freeze on you, which will only speed the hypothermic process. While the temperature in the cabin has risen slightly since we were last here, I'm fairly certain it's still below 0 degrees Celsius."

"No."

"Booth, evaporation acts as a coolant; it promotes the dissipation of body heat. This is _not_ the proper forum for a display of your mystifying puritanical tendencies," she admonished. "Besides, I need to check your body for puncture wounds and possible signs of fracture."

The agent shook his head-no way in hell he was doing a striptease in front of Bones, not even in the name of science.

"Your sense of modesty is baffling. You're about to lose consciousness as a result of your accident and you're afraid of undressing in front of me? I'll look away, if it helps to put your mind at ease. But just be aware that if our roles were reversed, I'd have no problem getting undressed in front of _you_."

Shaking to the bone as he was, Booth's mind still went there. Yes, _there_.

"I'm not walking around this 'possum infested dump naked" he argued weakly, fighting back tears of agony.

Brennan took off her overcoat and held it out to him.

"Bones! You need that!"

"You need it more than I do since your skin will be completely exposed once you undress. Please, Booth, take it."

With her appeals continuing to fall on unreceptive ears, Brennan finally traded reason for outright emotional manipulation.

"I probably can't get out of here without you anyway" she said, sounding resigned. "If you die, I'm as good as dead myself. I might as well hasten the process by removing my coat. As you remarked earlier about Snell, I might be doing myself a favor by 'going fast.' Did I quote you correctly?"

"God, that's really low Bones," Booth muttered. "Where'd you learn to play so dirty?"

The pleased smile she tossed his way gave him a pretty big clue.

Booth ripped the coat out of Brennan's hand if only to stop her from yammering on. After peeling off layer after layer of soggy clothing with raw, trembling hands while his partner did her utmost to bring one of Snell's few kerosene lamps back to life, he grudgingly put on the item in dispute.

It was absurdly tight on the arms and shoulders just as he knew it would be, but he managed to wedge himself into it-it'd serve her right if the seams split. Although he was positive he still looked ridiculous, Booth supposed there was at least some consolation to be had in the fact that it was tan and not some girly color like magenta or purple.

While his outlook on life had definitely improved with the change in wardrobe, it still felt like there were icicles hanging off his skin. He wanted center ice, he got center ice.

_Dead_ center.

"Are you happy? Do I look stupid enough for you?"

With the dusty lamp at last burning bright, Brennan finally turned around. She had to swallow the urge to laugh.

She knew the golden-ration proportions of Booth's body by memory, but it was still startling to see their vast difference in size spelled out in such a graphic manner. The coat didn't remotely cover his wide, smooth chest, and it was all he could do to keep the lower half of it closed over his pubic area.

Ignoring the slight lust she suddenly felt in favor of something more situationally relevant, the scientist placed the lamp on a coffee table close to her partner. She picked up her flashlight and crouched down in front of him.

"I'll start with your legs."

"What? What the heck are you doing?" he asked apprehensively.

"I'm checking you for injuries, remember?"

The fact that his beautiful, sexy coworker-the woman who had more than once kept him awake at night for reasons that were best left to the imagination-was kneeling in front of him, about to do all that expert touching of hers with him all but butt-naked, caused Booth to pull the coat even more tightly around his waist.

"Is this absolutely necessary?" he queried nervously.

Eye-level with a matching set of formidable quadriceps femoris muscles, an exasperated Brennan looked up.

"Yes, it is; please stop acting in such puerile fashion and try to be more cooperative. Whatever you and your typical male ego might like to think, I'm not doing this for my own amusement."

What did he possibly have to could counter _that_?

Browbeaten, Booth closed his eyes and carefully hitched the hem of the coat a few inches up his thigh while the forensic anthropologist began her examination.

And he thought the day had already been plenty difficult enough. The amount of willpower this latest trial was demanding of him was simply inhumane. Was this entire thing his karmic punishment for telling that little white lie to get out of that sophomoric FBI retreat?

If so, he was definitely going to have to pick and choose his future battles _way_ more judiciously from now on.


	9. No Ice and a Twist

After meticulously examining Booth's muscle-bound lower extremities with her flashlight, Brennan was relieved to report that other than what would decidedly turn out to be nasty bruises and a badly sprained ankle, everything else looked fine.

_Fine_ _indeed._

She willed her eyes to shut briefly in a sharp rejoinder that she was supposed to be perusing Booth's body with the hands and eyes of a physician, not those of a female in estrus. Ogling a patient while harboring prurient thoughts about them was exceedingly unprofessional behavior, no matter how attracted to the patient one happened to be.

Besides, she hadn't actually finished checking him over; for all she knew, Booth could have sustained serious injuries to his upper half which would make her inattention even more unforgivable.

Taking the antibiotic ointment out of the first aid kit, the scientist slathered a generous dollop of the gelatinous goo over Booth's scraped knees before an idea came to her. She stood up without a word, grabbed her purse, and dumped the contents on top of the sofa as her partner looked on. His eyes immediately widened.

"Where are you going?" he asked nervously when Brennan headed towards the door with the empty purse.

She kept walking and the agent felt duty-bound to intercept her, just in case she was planning on doing something completely crazy like she was occasionally known to do.

_God, Bones, _he thought angrily, having lost much of the comforting warmth that had only just started bringing his numb backside to life.

With her fingers already wrapped around the shaky doorknob, the anthropologist glanced back over her shoulder.

"Booth, I know you're probably still somewhat traumatized by your accident, but please try not to be so excitable" she chastised. "I'm just going outside to put some snow inside my purse to use as an icepack. You need a cold compress on your ankle; you have a very large contusion on your _lateral malleolus_ which has already caused several of the surrounding ligaments to swell rather alarmingly."

The offer immediately threw Booth into a tizzy. He pushed a hand into the door to make certain it stayed closed while the other remained glued to the two paired edges of Brennan's coat.

"No-no more cold stuff anywhere, Bones. I don't care if I end up looking like the hunchback of Notre Dame tomorrow. I'm already afraid I might be losing some really vital components to frostbite as it is."

"Your toes seem fine."

"Those aren't the vital components I'm worried about," he sniffed. "_No_ _ice_."

Brennan frowned as she studied her stubborn charge.

"You can be an extremely difficult person sometimes."

"Just give me some aspirin or something. I'm sure I'll be fine," he retorted feebly.

"I can't do that, Booth; if you suffered any significant internal injuries, anti-inflammatories could trigger a fatal hemorrhage."

"Has anyone told you that you're no Florence Nightingale, Bones? If we live through this, please promise me you won't take up nursing as a side career anytime soon; your bedside manner sucks. Are we done here?"

Her partner suddenly looked so helpless with his soaked, debris-riddled hair, downcast eyes and childish pout, Brennan was briefly tempted to put her arms around him and give him a reassuring hug, much as he so often did with her.

She ruthlessly stomped the impulse out.

Neither she nor Booth could afford to fall prey to the effects of rampant sentimentality during a life or death situation like they were currently facing. Besides, he was a capable adult, not a child.

Booth could soothe himself.

"No, we are _not_ done," Brennan answered curtly. "Now please take off the coat and wrap it around your waist so I can examine your torso, unless you're going to also allow me to inspect your groin area, in which case you can put it on the floor."

"No one is going near my groin area but me," he threw back.

He gave that supposed zinger a little more thought before declaring sheepishly, "never mind. You know what I meant."

Even when Booth's watery brown eyes were squinting back uncomfortably, Brennan showed few signs of pity. She continued waiving her flashlight in front of his face with what he was sure was _way_ too much enthusiasm.

Payback, no doubt, for what a pill he'd been towards her all day.

An ugly gash under the chin merited a dab of ointment, as did a smaller one over his right cheekbone. A scan of his neck brought with it the need for another layer of milky-white gel.

Booth submitted to his partner's ministrations with a tidal wave of misgivings arising from somewhere in the most primitive parts of his brain. Everything about what she was doing was causing alarms to go off all over his body, and things only went from bad to worse when the Jeffersonian's most valued employee switched her focus from his shoulders to his throbbing ribcage.

She sure was taking her own sweet time on those ribs, Booth thought moodily. No doubt checking every single one of the curving bones for signs of breakage-front _and_ back-while he did his best to stand still as a statue, his breath frozen in place just like the rest of him in the hopes that cooperating would somehow speed things along.

Brennan's frazzled patient would have been the first to admit that his newfound meekness wasn't entirely voluntary. He just couldn't remember for the life of him the last time a woman had run her fingers over his skin so gently, so thoroughly-hell, so _lovingly_-and for some unknown reason it was making his heart ache in the worst possible way.

In fact, he acknowledged sadly, it was pretty much a certainty that he'd never really been touched in quite such an intimate, caring manner before.

_How_ _pathetic_ _is_ _that,_ Booth reflected, doing a quick mental tally of his past relationships. Rebecca, Cam, Tessa, Hannah, high school and college sweethearts; none of those women had ever made him feel the way he was feeling now-totally gutted, dizzy, aroused, madly, stupidly in love.

Even _more_ pathetic? That there was absolutely zero going on between him and Bones in the romance department, and therefore no reason for him to be at all invested in what those two capable, angel-soft hands were unknowingly doing to him.

Nada.

This little drill was just business-as-usual for Bones, nothing more, nothing less. What he needed to do ASAP was stop being such a huge wuss already and let his companion finish her work in peace.

While Booth was performing his latest act of penance, Brennan happened to be doing a little soul-searching of her own. Her thoughts, it turned out, were no less conflicted-or contrite-than his.

With her fingers gingerly going over Booth's aggrieved form-the slightly dislocated left shoulder, the bruised and battered slab of ribs, upper arms and abs that were hours away from turning first an ugly shade of burgundy and then a dark, unsightly puce, the large knot already forming on one of his hips-the scientist was forcibly reminded of the gravity of Booths's recent travails. She could envision with perfect clarity the bridge's stressed first plank straining repeatedly under the combined weight of his large frame and the load he was carrying and then finally giving way under his feet, with the nearby ones following suit almost immediately in an unavoidable chain reaction.

She saw him flying, flailing, grasping at air, the logs exploding outwards from his hands in all directions until, finally slamming painfully into one of the sides of the hill, his body began a downward slide and a series of cartwheels that ended only when it crashed into the thin sheet of ice on the creek below and finally the hard, polished stones waiting treacherously underneath.

_Such a close, close call_ she whispered to herself guiltily, her blood suddenly running cold at the prospect of what she'd almost lost.

In hindsight, it was truly something of a miracle his injuries hadn't been worse. He could have easily impaled himself on a jutting tree branch, broken his back or neck, or smashed his skull on the rocks littering the bottom of the ravine.

With each welt she touched Brennan became more and more acutely aware that it could have been her, that it _should_ have been her, but that in his quietly heroic, typically selfless way, her ever-watchful partner had made sure it wasn't. Even when she was all but certain that he was still massively annoyed at her over the whole trip to Snell's with the loss of two expensive hockey tickets, and that it would have probably been somewhat morally gratifying to make her go out and do the dirty work of bringing all those logs back to the cabin by herself.

Momentarily forgetting all about professional deportment and the pressing need for emotional detachment, Brennan leaned forward and impulsively kissed Booth's right cheek. A few bristly hairs were starting to fill in the formerly smooth plane, and she wondered curiously what the spot would feel like if she touched her lips to it in the morning.

Prickly-tickly, rough. Something.

The image made her shiver.

"What was that for?" the stunned agent asked, caught completely off-guard by his partner's unexpected gesture.

"To thank you for your foolish, selfless act of bravado this afternoon."

Booth's eyebrows came together in that perfect amalgamation of surprise, amusement, complete confusion and disbelief Brennan knew so well.

"Huh?"

"You insisted on going by yourself to the shed because you were afraid I would fall on the bridge and hurt myself. Instead, it was you who fell."

_Yeah_, Booth agreed in total silence. He had sure fallen fast and hard-but what the woman in front of him didn't know was that the tumble had come about way earlier than today, and that it wasn't something he could ever hope to recover from.

There wasn't enough antibiotic ointment in the world to blanket _that_ mile-long wound.

"And also to attempt to reset our current conversational pattern," Brennan added quietly.

The agent's face continued its contorted dance. Now he'd _absolutely_ lost her.

"Our verbal interchanges today have been rather negative," she clarified. "In fact, it seems they've been that way for a while. Why do you think we've been arguing so much lately?"

She flicked her eyes in Booth's direction before shifting her gaze to the hissing and popping in the fireplace when he didn't answer.

"I would have thought that after our last conversation in your apartment when we burned those dates to nurse some sort of superstitious yearning of yours, things would have gotten easier between us, not harder."

Booth puffed out his cheeks, eventually letting out a long, unhurried breath.

"Oh, I don't know," he answered slowly. "Avoidance, probably. To keep us from saying the things we _really_ want to say."

"That makes no sense whatsoever; why wouldn't we just go ahead and _say_ those things, instead of engaging in all this incessant verbal sparring? Aren't we simply wasting time? It's completely irrational behavior, even for you."

Booth caught his companion's eyes for a brief moment and then looked away.

"Maybe because we're afraid the other person is still not ready to hear them."

"You sound like Sweets."

Cocking his head at his flustered companion, Booth gave her a lopsided grin. "Yeah, but the kid's been known to be right sometimes."

"Do you think we'll _ever_ get around to saying those things?" Brennan asked hopefully.

He nodded slowly, smiling still.

"Yeah-I do, Bones. When the time is right, we will."


	10. It's Getting Hot in Here

With Brennan focused exclusively on Booth's injuries, the inevitable soon happened-the wispy flames inside the fireplace began to fade. Another second of benign neglect and the mound of glowing sticks would be nothing more than a bucketful of useless white ash.

Darned close to being naked, the shivering G-man had more than enough reason to notice the looming catastrophe first.

He snatched a twig from the nearby stack and jabbed it into the smoking brick cavity, touching the dry, leafy end to the sputtering heap in the hopes of keeping the enterprise alive. There was absolutely no way his stiff, frozen limbs could wait for Bones to practice her fancy girl scout moves all over again, even if she _did_ have a butane lighter for a spiffy new best friend.

In an instant Brennan was a blur and a flash out of a corner of the agent's eye, careening towards him like a wild woman from the other side of the couch where she'd been rooting through their supplies. She leapt forward, firmly took a hold of her partner's wrist and pulled him towards her, almost yanking his arm out of its socket.

Booth felt his knees buckle under him as another round of searing pain knifed right through his already dislocated shoulder. For the second time that day, he came dangerously close to passing out.

"_What the hell..."_

Fighting to catch his balance, he lost his grip on the half-lit branch. It slipped harmlessly to the ground where it quickly fizzled out, but not before showering the bridge of his bare left foot with a hundred incendiary flecks.

"Jesus-what'd you do that for?' he asked angrily, jumping back and almost tripping over the pile of soggy clothes on the floor. He crucified Brennan with a prime 'what-the-f-k' glare as he rubbed his mangled foot.

Cuts, whacks, frostbite-and now a burn.

What _was_ it with this blasted day, and why wasn't it over with already?

"Don't, Booth. Don't do that again-please" Brennan said in a tremulous voice, obviously deeply shaken by whatever her companion had unwittingly done to offend her. "Your hands are almost certainly still numb; the neurological receptors on your fingertips aren't able to transmit impulses to your brain's synapses with their usual speed. Not now, and probably not for a while."

Taking a deep, deep breath, Booth shut his eyes tight and pinched the narrow space above his nose until it turned white. _One, two, three, four_...he was going to count all the way to ten before he opened his mouth again, just in case something awful came out.

Why-oh why-couldn't she ever give him a straightforward answer to anything?

"_What_?"

"You currently lack the ability to judge whether your hands are too close to the fire" she explained, consciously moderating her tone to sound less shrill. "As a consequence of your provisional sensory deficiency, you could easily get burned. You might not notice until it's too late."

Booth's countenance immediately lost most of its harshness. Mouth ajar, he stared at his partner and then down at the pale, delicate female hand digging into his forearm.

She was right about the first part of that statement, of course; his fingertips still couldn't feel a thing, though a little unpleasant prickling sensation told him they might slowly be coming back online.

But as to the 'might get burned part'?

_Too late for that, Bones_, he intoned silently; her fingers were already scalding the skin they were resting on almost to the point of blisters. He was burning just from being this close to her.

Had, in fact, been burning for years.

Confined to hell's eternal damnation for loving a woman who'd believed for the longest time she lacked the capacity to love him back even though he knew better-always had, since the very beginning.

It was the height of frustration and also the bane of his existence, this unwillingness of Bones to accept that her heart was big enough for two when an entire continent could have easily fit in there. The blind refusal to recognize what was so obvious to those who knew her even remotely was bewildering, to the point where sometimes he just wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her.

Best not to try. He strongly suspected-hell, he _knew_-it wouldn't go over well.

Recently though, specifically since that gloomy night when he'd just barely managed to push her out of the way of a speeding car and then she went on to confess she regretted not giving him a chance-and oh God, what a nasty, bloody war _that_ little conversation had started between his heart and his principles-there seemed to have been a steady shift in her views.

All he could say was, Amen to that.

An unguarded smile here, an edgy pause there, a look he'd caught only by an act of providence-and the bickering, of course. Always the bickering. So much of it now that he was sure its only purpose was to blind them both to the fact that they were actually moving towards each other at celestial speeds.

And by celestial he meant fast, of course, although Bones would doubtlessly correct him on that point. When had she not?

Patience, he reminded himself.

And patience meant waiting however long it took-he got that now. Moving on was not an option, and had never been; he'd learned that lesson too the hard way. There simply was no way for a love struck mope like himself to get over a woman like Temperance Brennan. He was clearly in over his head on this one-might just as well wait for her to come around, even if it took forty or fifty or sixty years more.

"Thanks" he whispered, already awash in guilt for having been too hard on her yet again when she was obviously only looking out for him.

"You're welcome," came the equally soft-spoken reply.

Brennan looked away, the warm, heavy weight of her partner's stare suddenly making her feel light-headed.

The vertiginous sensation wasn't something new, much as it pained the scientist to acknowledge that something so clichéd could ever happen to her. But the truth, clichéd or not, refused to be silenced.

There was no denying it; for the last few months her concentration had wavered dangerously around Booth. An unmitigated disaster as far as their work went because they spent almost every waking hour of their day together.

She'd secretly begun to worry that this uncharacteristic lack of focus might eventually lead to a costly mistake.

And maybe it already had.

Gingerly removing her hand from Booth's wrist, Brennan promptly made her way to Snell's makeshift kitchen, anxious to escape the deleterious effects those impassioned brown eyes were having on her well-established sang-froid. Once there she opened the lone cabinet and peered inside as Booth watched with a decidedly skeptical expression.

"What are you looking for?"

"I won't know until I find it. Hopefully, something which may help us to steal some time until help arrives."

"_Buy_, not steal, Bones. If you steal something someone might want it back" he teased.

Splaying his fingers out towards the fireplace, Booth kept a vigilant eye over his partner in case she got the urge to tackle him again. "You're wasting your time in there-I seriously doubt donut guy had much by way of gourmet supplies. Snell didn't strike me as the Julia Child type."

"We won't know what he had until we look" Brennan retorted, much more settled now that she had had found something other than Booth to keep her occupied. "We don't have the luxury of being complacent while we wait to be rescued."

Wise words from a wise woman, but the former Ranger was pretty sure not even Galileo and Einstein combined could have found anything worthwhile in the kitchen's barren landscape. Besides the fact that the guy had been dead for months, Snell hadn't even bothered to own a fridge-not that there would have been anywhere to plug it into.

No-probably not much there, Booth decided.

Or at least nothing he'd want to put in his mouth. As much as he disliked the idea of starving to death, botulism and salmonella seemed like far worse ways to join the roster of the dearly departed. He didn't need the unpleasant reminder that their sole 'bathroom' was now as inaccessible to them as the dark side of the moon.

Brennan bypassed what she perceived to be her partner's totally irrelevant, unhelpful commentary in favor of something more proactive. Her brow wrinkled in concentration as her eyes followed the bouncing pinprick of light on its sad journey over spider webs, empty wrappers and yet more dust.

Just as Booth had forecast-and much to her annoyance because she vehemently disliked losing at anything-Brennan found nothing of value inside the dilapidated cupboard. A few rusty cans in the back were fatally outdated and bulging in a way that cautioned that the expiration date on the bottom should probably not be taken lightly. Mice, meanwhile, had taken advantage of the homeowner's absence to make quick work of the rest; shredded bits of paper and plastic along with telltale rodent scat were all that remained of Snell's more ephemeral comestibles.

She shut the door with a frustrated slap.

But even if she _had_ been temporarily proven wrong, Brennan wasn't willing to concede defeat just yet. She sullenly marched off to Snell's bedroom to try her luck again, leaving behind another set of instructions for her calamity-prone partner.

"You can _cautiously_ start throwing scraps of wood into the fire, Booth, one at a time; just make sure your hands remain at a safe distance."

"Okay _mom_" he replied cheekily, his smiling face now lit by an altogether more pleasing glow.

He looked rakish and smug and disarmingly cute with his matted hair, dirt-streaked cheeks and typical self-satisfied grin. But as seductive as they were, Brennan stalwartly refused to reward the lethal, inveigling displays of charm with anything but a half-hearted grimace.

She disappeared into the gloom of Snell's bedroom flashlight in hand.

First on her list, plugging the hole in the window the opossum had scampered out of. Sealing the small crack would not only help conserve what little heat the fireplace was generating, it would also keep wildlife at bay-a result sure to please her partner and go at least part way towards making amends for the bad turn their day had taken.

Brennan grabbed the only pillow on the bed, figuring it would work as well as anything else. She also took the opportunity to evaluate the mattress and the few linens on it for possible future use; given the circumstances, no resource, no matter how seemingly paltry, could be taken for granted.

They needed to work out some sort of sleeping arrangement soon, her and Booth, awkward as that situation was bound to become; the hard, cold stone floor in front of the chimney was not at all conducive to an evening of restorative sleep. If Snell's mattress proved to be even marginally functional, they could carry it into the living room and attempt to share it as civilly as two people who'd been at each other's throats all day possibly could.

The only other viable alternative was the couch.

The anthropologist had already considered using Snell's sofa as a possible lounging spot, but she recognized that option was out of the question, at least for her. While she'd never had a problem sleeping in unorthodox places-crumbling barns with cattle and chickens for roommates, dirt floors with nothing but her own folded jacket for a pillow, even guano-laden caves came to mind-there was something so very sinister about Snell's faded, moldering tan sofa with its acrid smell and its thick veil of mysterious particulates that the mere thought of lying on it triggered a rare gag reflex.

Besides, there was only room for a single sleeper.

While in theory that would work out fine for at least _one _of them-just not her-in reality neither partner was likely to use it. Knowing Booth as well as she did, Brennan didn't think he'd take a shining to the mite-infested cushions any more than she had. If anything, her finicky companion would probably be even _more_ repelled by the suggestion than she herself was.

So therefore here she stood, perusing Snell's old bed with hopeful eyes. Unfortunately, the sustained burst of LED light only confirmed her initial suspicions.

The deceased man's mattress was just as nauseatingly repugnant as his couch, and therefore just as likely to remain untouched by _either_ partner. Dark yellow stains and the sinus cavity-opening smell of ammonia strongly suggested that the opossum and possibly the entire marsupial's extended family had until recently called the primitive cot home.

Considered objectively, the discovery was only a small setback, especially when compared to the much more serious blows the rest of their day had already delivered. But coupled with all the other misfortunes already on the list, the bad news hit the anthropologist hard.

Brennan found herself fighting for air, suddenly grief-stricken and sick to her stomach.

Clicking off the flashlight, she walked to the window and stared out at the impressive spectacle nature was putting on outside for no one in particular.

It'd been years since she'd felt this impotent; possibly not since she'd been locked up inside the trunk of that car when she was forced to live with that dreadful foster family.

Of course, this situation was nowhere as scary. She wasn't a minor alone in the dark wondering whether any of her caregivers would ever come back to get her before she suffocated or starved to death. But in some fundamental ways, it was even more unsettling.

Precisely because she _wasn't_ alone.

Her own life she felt perfectly at ease gambling away in the name of science and justice. She'd faced the possibility of death more times than she could count, knowingly venturing into highly volatile places and situations all around the globe in her mission to expose corruption and depravity wherever it lay buried.

She had never had a problem accepting the risks. Along with her often solitary-and sometimes incredibly lonely-lifestyle, it came with the territory.

But today...

Brennan wrapped her arms around herself, her lined, tired eyes only half-focused on the snowy panorama. Today was an entirely different species of animal. She had dragged someone she cared very deeply about-and she knew that sooner or later she would have to be brutally frank about just how far those feelings ran-along with her into a proverbial lion's den, and there was no way to outrun the fact that she alone would be responsible for whatever happened to him.

Beginning to tremble in the ice-cold room, the scientist finally admitted what she'd been avoiding all along: that they should have turned back at the ranger station just like Booth wanted. Probably should have never set off on this misguided expedition at all.

They could have been sipping a beer and rubbing shoulders at Booth's hockey game, sharing yet another evening together in what was starting to very much resemble...what, she wasn't sure, but a very pleasurable pattern which she had come to hope would not only continue, but eventually turn into something even more intimate, as well as possibly more permanent.

Would tonight have been _the_ night?

After the game, sharing a drink while they flirted with a little more conscious intent than usual in one of their apartments? The night they decided to finally go from partners to more? They were getting closer all the time; she could feel it, and she strongly suspected Booth could feel it too. Closer and closer, and that's undoubtedly why there was so much sniping and over-all unpleasantness in the air.

Although neither of them was willing to say it out loud, she knew that they'd both been waiting for the right moment, the right catalyst, the right set of variables to come along in order to make the switch. Always waiting...and now there might be no sand left inside the hourglass of their relationship.

Brennan shook her head despondently, looking around her with disgust.

Snell's bone-rattlingly frigid cabin with its grimy floors and its decaying, smelly furniture had _absolutely_ nothing right about it.

Not even adequate.

But much worse than the simple loss of a romantic opportunity, if anything happened to Booth because she'd been too stubborn to give up her quest to find their victim's killer in the face of risks which she could now could accept were totally unreasonable...

How could she have been so blind to the very real dangers lurking behind her obstinate pursuit?

Feeling completely hollow inside, she seriously considered dropping to her knees and crying her eyes out until she either passed out from exhaustion or froze to death. But something strong and unbreakable within wouldn't let her give up-not yet. She shook off her momentary fit of depression and turned the flashlight back on.

Almost invisible behind the dresser was the outline of a door. Brennan pushed the heavy chest of drawers to the side, determined to improve her and Booth's questionable odds.


	11. Dragging the Past

Unaware that at this very moment his partner was doing the exact same thing, Booth walked to the window in the living room and looked into the distance. Still snowing; big, heavy, wet snowflakes that would have stuck to the pine trees surrounding Snell's property save for the fact that the wind wasn't giving them the slightest chance.

Not that he could hardly see the trees-the air outside was about as clear as a bowl of cream-of-mushroom soup.

The one thing he couldn't quite figure out was why everything seemed so bright. Without the sun or streetlights it should have been coal-black out there, but he could still see the blizzard in all its blinding magnificence swirling past at brutal speeds. Sideways, up and down, you name it. Bones' car, though, might have just as well been in parked in outer Mongolia; neither the vehicle nor the tracks they had left there and back were anywhere to be seen.

How many feet of snow were already on the ground? Two, three? How many more coming?

He leaned his head against the smudged pane of glass, feeling its coolness on his forehead.

There was no hiding from it. Things were bad-not just the snow, but everything.

How could he let this happen? In his earlier rush to blame his partner for getting stranded he'd conveniently overlooked his own, larger share of the responsibility for the debacle. The lie he'd cavalierly handed off to personnel about his wherabouts this weekend; agreeing to take Bones' car when he knew there was a storm on the horizon and they'd be going through rough terrain; leaving his common sense behind because he was so desperate to make a good impression on the woman in whose presence he invariably tended to devolve into a spineless moron that he couldn't think straight.

He knew damn well she suffered from tunnel vision when it came to science. Knew that sometimes-alright, often-she thought she was downright immortal. How many times had he stopped her from barreling into a building after an armed suspect when _he_ was the one carrying the gun? He hadn't allowed her to do that in the past (well, he'd certainly _tried_ his best), putting his foot down no matter how much flak he got for it. Yet today he'd basically let her do the exact same thing. He'd chosen to ignore the blatant dangers ahead in order to curry some favor with her.

No. He should have just said no and taken his lumps.

At least they'd be sleeping in their own warm, comfy beds tonight.

He hobbled back the few feet back to the living room and gave sitting down cross-legged in front of the fireplace the old college try. Every muscle, every joint and ligament was hurling invectives at the day he was born. His partner's tiny, binding coat wasn't helping matters one bit.

The only saving grace? That at least she wasn't there to witness his rudimentary acrobatics because he was certain at some point he would have flashed her.

_Bones._

Despite the guilt and the agony and chattering teeth that were still rattling his brain cells around like coffee beans in a grinder, Booth managed to scrounge up a half-smile for his girl.

It sure was an amazing woman he'd hitched his wagon to. Someone else would have probably freaked out at the sight of him flailing about at the bottom of that soggy pit, but not his Bones-she had remained cool as a cucumber. Not because she didn't care, he knew, but because she cared too much to waste precious time losing her mind and throwing her hands up in the air when she could be helping.

Fiery, driven, maddeningly stubborn Temperance Brennan. A Tasmanian devil of energy in a lab coat and latex gloves; the light-and love-of his life. When would he have the guts to tell her how he felt?

Not anytime soon, that much he knew. To unleash an air raid of that magnitude over this rural outpost of theirs seemed like sheer madness, especially when neither of them could just walk away and take five if the situation got too scary. Timing, timing was everything; rushing things like he had that night outside the Hoover, the night he'd allowed Sweets to talk him into putting everything on the line even though his gut was telling him to wait, could only lead to another round of massive heartache.

Booth's meditations on the vagaries of love and synchronicity came to an abrupt end when his ears picked up the sound of scraping coming from Snell's bedroom, like a piece of heavy furniture being moved around.

What the heck was she doing in there he wondered, realizing his partner had been MIA for a while. It's not as if the long-dead hermit had been a man of many possessions; he might not have had much else going for him, but at least being a packrat wasn't one of donut guy's sins.

"You okay in there, Bones? You need my help?"

"No, Booth-I can do this by myself," Brennan yelled back, sounding slightly out of breath. "I'm just rearranging some of Snell's mobiliary. Please remain by the fire; you need to get your body temperature back up."

Though he thought of checking up on her, Booth decided to take advantage of the rare moment of solitude to do something he knew he _had_ to do even if he wasn't looking forward to it. He scooted over to the dripping jacket hanging off the arm of the single chair in the living room and pulled a soaked notepad and a pen out of one of the pockets.

The lined pieces of paper were a total loss-no way they could stand up to the pressure from a ballpoint pen, assuming the pen still worked. The front and back of the notepad, however, _those _he might be able to work with even if his writing got a little smeared; made of cardboard, they'd survived their arctic plunge more or less intact and certainly much better than he.

The agent scribbled a few words down in the hopes that if the worst came to pass they would at least provide a little bit of solace to the one person in his life who would need it the most.

"What are you doing?" Brennan asked, catching him unawares. There was no hiding the notepad and pen in his hand.

Booth looked up guiltily. His partner let go of the box she'd been dragging behind her, a look of consternation on her face.

"Nothing-just a to-do list, for when we get back. Pick up the dry cleaning and stuff. What's that?"

"You're writing to Parker" she announced quietly.

Her lightning-fast mind had of course leapt to the right conclusion, giving Booth no out but the truth.

"Yeah; not that he's going to have to read it or anything, mind you" he replied casually, downplaying the document's dark significance. "It's just-just in case, you know? I'm worried if I leave something on my phone he won't get it."

Tears burned in Brennan's eyes and she turned her head away. All that desperation she'd felt back in Snell's bedroom came back, charging into her conscience like an angry bull.

Parker.

Booth had a child, a son he adored. It wasn't just Booth she was responsible for-it was also Parker, along with Pops. How could she have overlooked that, even for a second?

"You've come to the conclusion that we're not going to survive. It's not like you at all, giving up, especially at this early stage of an emergency; you must feel our situation is truly hopeless" she said, barely hanging on to her composure.

"Nah, that's not it, Bones. But when you have kids, you have to cover all your bases. That's all. Be extra careful."

Brennan looked unconvinced.

"We're going to be fine-honest. It can't snow forever and sooner or later someone's going to notice we're missing. Anyone you care to write to-just in case?" he asked sheepishly, offering her the front of the small book after ripping off the part he'd written on. "Just be careful; the ink runs a little."

She laughed forlornly, wiping her eyes as she shook her head.

"No. My dad would think it's completely out of character for me to leave him any kind of farewell note. He would probably assume I was already suffering from hypothermia-induced delirium when I wrote it, and that would almost certainly lead him to discount it's contents. And the only other person I would want to write to is already here."

She didn't tell him about the letter she'd already written him years ago during the Grave Digger ordeal, perhaps irrationally hoping that if she held back that crucial piece of information there'd be a time and a place to share its message with him later.

"Awww Bones" Booth said, touched by his partner's words.

Their eyes met, like they had on so many other occasions, and like so many times before Brennan had the sudden desire to pounce on top of her partner and kiss him. With meaning and heart this time, in case the opportunities were truly running out.

But reason prevailed like it always did and the anthropologist went back to dragging her large cardboard box into the living room instead.


	12. Do You Know the Way to Shangri-La?

"So what's in there?" Booth asked, tilting his head towards the large box.

"And more to the point, where the heck did it come from? You pull it out of a hat or something? Because there was nothing like that in Snell's bedroom when we looked before."

"Hat?"

An eyebrow inched up into Brennan's hairline, both curious and decidedly judgmental.

"It would be impossible for a box with these dimensions to fit into any type of conventional hat. Your guess isn't a particularly educated one, Booth; perhaps it's a sign that you're suffering from a concussion."

"It was a joke, Bones," Booth clarified with a snort. "You still haven't told me where you found it."

"In the back of Snell's closet."

"There was a closet in there?"

Booth tried visualizing the tiny alcove but for the life of him still couldn't fathom where there'd be room for a closet. Besides, it was hard to believe two trained experts could have missed something so significant during their earlier sojourn to the bedroom.

"The door was blocked by the dresser; given the poor lighting in the room, I think we can be excused for failing to notice the opening before," Brennan explained.

She turned down the flaps of the box intent on revealing its many secrets when Booth suddenly sat up ramrod straight, looking troubled.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa-hold on just a minute. How do you know there isn't anything alive inside that thing just waiting to pounce on you? There's wild animals running all over the place-you could end up with rabies."

"I already looked inside" Brennan stated calmly, pulling out a large, white bundle wrapped in a clear plastic bag and holding it out for her partner to peruse. "It's full of linens; it appears that there's a comforter, a pillow, a set of sheets and a blanket. We can use the comforter as a mattress. While it won't provide too much cushioning, it should at least offer some insulation."

Just as Brennan had predicted, Booth took an immediate dislike to the suggestion.

"I'm not sleeping on _anything_ that came from this place. It's probably infested with bedbugs, or termites or chiggers-maybe something even worse. Isn't there some horrible illness with a weird name floating around?"

"Are you perhaps referring to Ebola? Insects aren't carriers, Booth-infection only occurs through direct contact with bodily fluids."

"No-the other one. The chicken-monkey one."

As soon as she heard the malapropism Brennan broke into a hearty, unapologetic fit of laughter. After all the times her partner had singled out her minor tweaking of idioms for ridicule, it seemed only fair to derive some guilt-free jollies at his expense.

"The chikungunya virus is transmitted by mosquitoes, and so far its spread has been limited to the tropics. I don't think you have anything to worry about" she announced, her small moral victory highlighted by a circumspect grin. "In addition, the box wasn't even open until I cut through the packing tape just a few minutes ago. The items are sealed in plastic; they're obviously new, as they still have their tags attached. The shipping label refers to a Sherry Snell as the sender. Wasn't she the victim's sister?"

"Yeah."

"She must have been trying to help her brother out, although it doesn't appear he wanted her assistance. He never bothered to look inside."

"What are you planning on doing with those?"

Even before he completed the sentence a giant, noisy tumbleweed of suspicion began rolling around inside Booth's skull. She couldn't possibly be considering...

"Don't tell me you're thinking of putting this stuff on Snell's bed and sleeping on it!" he blurted out, his fears coalescing into an idea so appalling it was nearly impossible to put enough exclamation points by it. "There was a 'possum running around in there for Christ's sake, Bones!"

"No" Brennan replied quietly, reminded of the queasiness she'd only recently felt while checking out the infamous bed. "The mattress was...it was unserviceable, even to me. I figured we could place the bedding on the floor in front of the fireplace. It won't make for a very comfortable sleeping arrangement, but it should be more agreeable than lying on the bare ground."

In quick succession, Booth's eyes skipped from Brennan to the linens she was holding to the fireplace. Gulping nervously he asked,

"So you want us to sleep together on that stuff, you and me? With all that's been going on between us lately?"

"Unless you want to stake your claim to the couch."

Booth stared at the tattered sofa with open hostility; an enemy insurgent coming right at him would have probably received a warmer greeting.

"Nah. I mean, it's not a big deal anyway. We've slept together before-on assignment. Platonically. Like not...forget about it."

"I _will_ forget about it, because you're not making any sense. This is just an emergency measure, Booth" Brennan argued, trying to appeal to her companion's admittedly hard-to-find rational side. "It should hold no greater significance than that. Besides, we're adults as well as professionals-surely we can overcome our recent superciliousness towards one another for the common good. It's only a temporary arrangement."

Though secretly neither partner was entirely buying into the well-intentioned party line, for the sake of more blessed avoidance they both ran with it as if it were gospel.

"Yeah-sure" Booth agreed, disregarding a plethora of reservations pretty much like he'd been doing all day. Why start being cautious this late in the game? And really, what else could possibly go wrong?

Surely by now he and Bones must have earned a get-out-of-jail-free card.

"Of course-no biggie."

Happy that they'd finally reached some sort of understanding, Brennan tore into the bag and unfurled the thick comforter on the floor with a flourish. In mint condition and sinfully, snowily plush, it resembled a field of fluffy dandelions gone to seed right in the middle of Snell's grey living room.

"It's big enough that we could fold it in half for more cushioning and still have enough room to sleep on it," she noted. "I wonder why he chose not to use these? They could have only made his life more pleasant."

"Haven't you seen how he lives...lived? The guy was certifiable. I mean, he didn't even bother to open up his sister's present. Who gets a package in the mail and doesn't open it right away?"

"Mental illness or a misguided desire to be entirely self-sufficient."

Brennan stared at the items with an air of regret.

"Whatever Snell's reasons for not putting these objects to good use, it worked to our advantage."

After neatly laying out the bedding where she wanted it, the scientist crouched down and began tossing more wood onto the fire. Her single-minded, humorless mien mellowed considerably as she studied her banged-up partner, sitting just a few feet away.

"How are you feeling?"

"Better. Fine. I'm fine," Booth replied stoically.

Brennan skewered the agent through-and-through with an incredulous look.

"_Really_? The damage to your body is quite extensive, Booth. I would have thought you'd be in a great deal of pain now that the numbing effects of the monoamines secreted by your body during the fall have more than likely worn off and you've had an opportunity to take full stock of your injuries."

Booth looked around evasively and then he sighed.

"No, not really. Everything hurts. My back's the worst" he finally admitted, his carefree face melting into a puddle of pain. "I mean, it was bad from the drive, but now...You sure I can't have that aspirin?"

Brennan shook her head, her expression sympathetic but unyielding.

"Yes, I'm sure. I'm sorry, Booth-it's too dangerous. Would you settle for a massage instead? I'd be very careful; I know you have abrasions and contusions throughout your body. I'll do my best to avoid them."

Booth didn't have to think twice about the offer. Frankly, if Snell himself had clawed his way out of the depths of his grave and volunteered to massage his back with his brittle, curled-up fingers, he would have said yes.

"Okay. But please, _please_ be gentle, Bones."

"Of course. You'll have to take off your coat and lay on your back."

"You want me _naked_?" Booth retorted. "What _is_ it with you and getting me out of my clothes today? I gotta tell you, this latest fixation of yours is really starting to freak me out."

Brennan unconsciously bit her lower lip.

Booth. Naked. Alone. Together.

One bed, or what passed for a bed, with nothing for entertainment but each other for hours-maybe days-on end. The hidden potential in that scenario was truly staggering and a rush of monoamines of her own swamped the anthropologist's nervous system, triggering yet another tap dance of erratic heart beats inside her chest. It was a wonder she hadn't needed a defibrillator yet.

Perhaps, she thought moodily, she hadn't given her generous offer the thought it deserved.

"You won't be naked-I'll cover you with a sheet" she shot back in her most dispassionate voice, which she feared might not sound nearly blasé enough to fool her highly intuitive companion. "No different than if you went for a therapeutical massage at a rehabilitation facility."

"Fine" Booth simpered, apparently failing to notice his companion's discomfiture. "Look the other way, though."

For this second disrobing Brennan held on to her sarcastic remarks and simply did as she'd been asked, too unnerved by the side trip her psyche had taken to put up any kind of verbal fight.

The agent waited until his partner's eyes were fully averted before he shimmied out of the tight coat with a grunt. Laying face-down on the comforter, he wrapped a sheet around his lower half and safely wedged it under his hips.

After the wringer he'd been put through the sensation as he sank into the covers was beyond description-pure, unadulterated pleasure, for sure; the instant warmth, the cloud-like softness, even the powdery, homey scent of down that filled his nostrils. He smiled goofily into the blanket's comforting cocoon, ripples of welcome relief blowing over his mangled body.

"Booth..." he heard his partner gasp as she spun back around.

Brennan immediately dropped to her knees. She placed the kerosene lamp on a spindly side table in an effort to get a better view of the unprecedented carnage before her.

"What?" he asked.

"Your back...I should have insisted that we ice it as soon as we returned from the ravine."

In less than half an hour, the small welts the anthropologist had inspected earlier had swollen grotesquely, some starting to resemble large marbles. To add further to the unnerving reveal, a network of broken capillaries had begun to stain a large area of Booth's exposed skin, leaving behind a roadmap of interconnected dark maroon blotches that went all the way from his neck to where the sheet began by his hips.

And Brennan was convinced that the damage didn't end there.

"I'm sure it looks worse than it feels" Booth lied, trying to reassure his worried partner although he knew there was no way his back could look any worse than it felt. Everything was twisting and throbbing and aching to the point where if he'd been a dog, he would have been whining to be put down.

Mindful of what she imagined his huge discomfort to be, Brennan warmed her hands inside the fireplace before looking for a relatively unscathed patch of skin on which to begin. She honed in on the ligaments on either side of his spine and pressed down gently with her thumbs.

"Oh God" Booth moaned loudly, as pain and pleasure became one and all, impossible to tell apart.

As soon as she heard Booth yelp, the anthropologist jerked her hands away.

"Am I hurting you?"

"No, no-don't stop, Bones. That felt good. I mean, it _does_ hurt, but in a good way-like the song," he babbled. "You've got magic fingers."

Brennan smiled.

"Just very well trained fingers. Thai massage, like I used on you before in your elevator. I'm also well versed in other traditional healing methods, such as Ayurvedic medicine and acupuncture."

"I'll skip the needles and the Ayurda-whatever stuff, but I'll definitely take the hands. Ooooh...You know, every time I go for therapy on my back, I think how nice it would be to be married to a masseuse."

Realizing what he'd just implied about her _and_ them, Booth found himself backpedalling almost immediately.

"Not that I'm comparing you to a regular masseuse, or that we'd ever be..."

"Just relax, Booth-I can feel your back muscles spasming again. You're still very tense."

Tense. Yeah, he was tense.

And also a little more than turned on, in the worst possible way. In the most _uncomfortable_ way. What would it be like to get this kind of attention on a regular basis, knowing it would probably end in something even better? There definitely would be side perks to being married to Bones that went beyond the inimitable pleasure of her company. A massage every month, maybe even every week. That was the road to Shangri-La, right there.

And with a little luck, a rightful invitation to foreplay.

And here he was again, thinking about sex and marriage.

What in the blazes was wrong with him? And come to think of it, what was wrong with the world in general? The weird late April snowstorm, the kooky ranger, a dead battery on a brand new car, a creek that should have been frozen solid but wasn't-and now here he was, completely in the buff, with his partner's hands all over him.

And somewhere in between, conferences had been skipped, retreats had been ditched, and a hockey game had been missed.

Heaven or hell-yup, that was it, he decided; he was probably like the guy in the _Sixth Sense_ and he was already dead without realizing it, and he was either in heaven or hell.

The problem was that at the moment it was kind of hard to tell which one of those two otherworldly realms he'd been assigned to.


	13. Great Expectations

_Yes, I'm still alive and still plunking away at the keyboard, if anyone's out there!_

Aware of how absolutely volatile the situation was, Booth waited for Brennan's hands to approach the demarcation line set by the sheet with something akin to dread. Well, maybe not dread exactly, but those fingers weren't being welcomed with open arms either.

Nevertheless, the agent gritted his teeth and swore to take whatever was coming like a man. After all he _was_ a man-a brave man; and a soldier, and a damn good FBI agent to boot. A man who was perfectly capable of handling whatever life chose to throw at him. Torture, bullets, serial killers-bring them on.

But when those familiar hands started kneading both sides of his bare derrière...that was _the_ breaking point for Booth. Whatever happened to the conventional wisdom that coworkers shouldn't be feeling each other up no matter what?

He did what any sane man, soldier or flatfoot, would do under such extreme duress-he tried to bolt.

"Bones..."

"Yes, Booth?"

"Um...you're going a little low there, aren't you?" he said, discreetly sidling away.

Oblivious to whatever shenanigans were going on in Booth's mind, Brennan immediately pressed her jittery charge back into place.

"Please don't move. And I have to go 'low'. The set of muscles that comprise the back extend well past the hips into the gluteal region of the body" she explained, using the same simplistic terminology she'd use if she were speaking to a group of third graders, which might not be too far afield as far as Booth went. "They don't simply end at the iliac crest. We've already established that while you're not in a physician's office, this still constitutes a medical procedure. One which I think we'll both agree I'm eminently qualified to implement."

"It's just...I'm not wearing..."

Brennan felt her blood pressure shoot upwards; there was that tedious puritanical upbringing again, getting in the way of what needed to be done.

"If you're concerned on my behalf because you think I might be uncomfortable with nudity-specifically yours-please don't be. I'm not thinking of you as an individual while I'm doing this; all I see is a patient in a great deal of pain."

She pulled down the sheet and took a deep breath, flushing a little when she caught herself staring wantonly at Booth's taught nether cheeks.

Yes, that was it; Booth was a nameless patient and nothing else, she insisted, even as she went on to appraise the clean, dart-shaped cut of his masculine structure, black and blue as it was. But if this was really the case, then why was her conscience rebelling against that neatly packaged version of the story?

Undoubtedly because it wasn't the truth.

Brennan could hardly deny that since her epiphany months ago, when she'd shockingly caught a glimpse of herself not in a mirror but in a dead woman's regrets, it had gotten much harder to ignore her strong feelings for her partner, both the overtly physical ones and those by far sneakier emotional ones.

That much had already been admitted and accepted, however grudgingly.

But this sudden utter lack of professionalism, this violent desire to caress him and kiss him and meld with him until she was no more, was brand new. Lust and love-_eros_ and _agape_-had apparently been colluding behind her back while she was doing God knows what. Having already made her weak-willed and impatient, they were now shamelessly winning the war on her brain.

And this little hands-on exercise of theirs clearly wasn't helping in the least.

But while heart and body might have wanted to do much more than tend to Booth's injuries the scientist's scruples held on for dear life, counselling that this wasn't exactly the right time for wild expressions of ardor.

Healer first and woman second, at least for the time being.

"So there's no reason you should feel self-conscious at all" Brennan continued, whizzing like a meteor through her ambivalence. "You could be a cadaver for all I care."

"A cadaver, huh?"

Booth heard the annoyance in his coworker's voice as logic came fighting back to save the day.

"I'll admit that was not a particularly good analogy, since a cadaver wouldn't have a need for physical therapy. Let's just say you could be a bedridden octogenarian, then."

"I'm not sure which comparison I like the least."

Brennan refused to engage her quarrelsome patient any longer. She closed her eyes and and vowed to stay in control, fingers chasing strained ligaments and afflicted muscles wherever they led.

Even if the journey made them _both_ squirm.

While Booth might have started out with some legitimate qualms about the operation, he inevitably succumbed to his partner's perfectly-synchronized thumbs. One by one the spasms in his back disappeared into thin air as if whisked away by an angel. And Bones _could_ be an angel, Booth agreed, when she wasn't killing him with temptation.

By the time the session ended, the agent was drooling and close to falling asleep.

"Is that better?"

"Yeah" he mumbled drowsily, his eyelids fluttering open at the sound of his partner's voice. "It's lucky Sweets isn't here. He's always looking for ulterior motives and secret agendas and things. God knows what he would have said if he'd walked in on us now."

"We've never had a talk about our expectations for the future since that night at your apartment. We might not have even spoken then, had it not _been_ for Sweets" Brennan theorized, covering Booth back up and sitting beside him. "He could have actually been of some assistance to us tonight, considering how acrimonious some of our interactions have been throughout the day. The last few months, really."

Booth knew what she was saying. That there had been some movement between their tectonic plates since that last blizzard, but no major earthquake. The land masses continued to inch along but still refused to merge.

And he couldn't exactly pinpoint why, though he strongly suspected it was due to all the things that still remained unsaid between them after having spent seven months and one misguided relationship apart.

Mindful of the sheet around him, the agent propped himself up on an elbow.

"I'm sorry, Bones."

"For what?" she asked.

"For everything, for hurting you."

"You're the one who's hurt Booth; I'm only cold, and a perhaps a bit hungry. And as to the car, we've already established that wasn't your fault."

"Not for this-although maybe a little for this. I was talking about accidentally hurting you with Hannah."

"Booth..."

"And also for being so angry at you that night at the bar after that...that stupid proposal, when you were only trying to help. For being so wrapped up in this Broadsky thing that I've kind of put the discussion about where we might be going on the back-burner."

He looked at the fire before declaring softly, "That's not where it belongs."

"Broadsky?" Brennan asked, surprised that the elusive killer was even part of the equation.

"Yeah. It's always in the back of my mind, that he might come back one day and try to even the score for me messing up his last job. I feel like he's hunting me, and I'm afraid of the collateral damage that might come as a result."

"Collateral damage? I don't understand."

"That's what Broadsky calls the innocent people who happen to get in the way of his personal vendetta. The ones who end up getting hurt-or worse. People like you, Bones."

She nodded.

"I understand. It's perfectly reasonable to postpone any major life decisions when your focus is so narrow right now. But about Hannah, Booth, I told you no in unequivocal terms a year ago when you asked me for a chance. You were perfectly entitled to build a life with someone else-you even advised me that you would try to do just that outside your office that night. I had ample warning about the possible repercussions my decision might have and I still said no."

Booth noticed the tears clinging to Brennan's lashes and he flinched.

"Bones..."

"By trying to limit your exposure to pain, which is what I convinced myself I was doing when I turned you down, I actually made things worse for you. Expecially after I left. If anything, I'm the one who should..."

"You know what, Bones" Booth urged gently, "what do you say we both just ditch the guilt trips. We keep punishing ourselves over things we should have done or said and I don't think either of us really deserves to go through that wringer anymore. I think we're pretty decent people; we did what we did out of necessity, to keep ourselves up and running in the best way we knew how. Let's just start fresh, right now. Because I feel about you exactly like I did a year ago-nothing's changed."

"I have. I've changed" Brennan said, smiling through her tears. "And I'm glad. And I want you to know that the person I am now would have had no qualms saying yes to you back then."

"Tell you what-when we get out of here, we're going to get this baby back on track. Broadsky or no Broadsky. Starting tonight, I'm done letting that bastard dictate what I do with my life. We'll catch him soon enough."

"Baby?" she asked, looking slightly alarmed.

"Metaphorically speaking, Bones. As soon as this little crisis is over I'm going to prove to you that I'm commited to moving forward. The past is gone, as far as I'm concerned. All of it, except for you and me."

The scientist could happily endorse this change in diplomatic policy.

"You and me...while not grammatically correct, I very much like the sound of that."

The couple remained side by side for several minutes, cradled in a sweetly comforting silence, when Brennan's observant eyes-eyes that were particularly trained to capture every tiny detail about her partner-noticed the crop of fresh goosebumps on his arms.

She stood up without explanation.

_She's making a run for one of those awful granola bars of hers_, Booth thought, when Brennan surprised him by removing her blazer and draping it over his feet.

"What are you doing? It's not that hot in here for you to be taking your jacket off-and my feet are fine."

His panic quadrupled when he saw the zipper on her jeans heading the wrong way down the road.

"Bones..." he began, before realizing he really had absolutely nothing to end that sentence with. What? _Bones, don't take your clothes off because I wouldn't want to see you in the buff? Don't jump into bed with me naked because there's no way in hell I'd enjoy it? _

As if saying anything along those lines wouldn't stretch the bounds of credulity beyond belief.

"You're cold; skin-to-skin contact preserves warmth by minimizing the surface areas of the body exposed to air. I'm going to undress-only _partially_, to safeguard your morals-and lie against you."

She made it all sound so rational, so eminently reasonable, Booth almost came to believe the idea was a good one. But it wasn't; it was a _terrible_ idea, all the way around.

The pants came off and almost immediately the shirt, and their absence revealed a pretty white lace bra that, although perfectly functional and prim, simply wasn't quite able to safeguard everything under its care.

Booth imagined that with her fabulous curves, few models would.

He dared to look further down. He was met by a very cute bellybutton-first time he'd had a chance to see it that didn't involve some impure errant thought-and then the elastic of her flowery bikini briefs. Two long, shapely legs guided him all the way down to the floor and back.

"Um, Bones, I don't think that's a good idea" Booth sputtered, reduced to quoting his exact thoughts verbatim because everything else suddenly seemed to require _way_ too much effort.

"Why? It has a solid scientific basis in fact."

"Why? Because...you know..."

"No, I don't know."

His eyebrows did a little dance in the hopes that his unlikely roommate would just get the drift already without him having to extrapolate further.

No such luck.

"You're a woman, I'm a guy..."

"This is getting ridiculous, Booth. If you're worried about your modesty _again,_ I'll stay on top of the sheets. Besides, I feel it's an appropriate time to remind you that I've seen you naked before. I assume little about your body's structure has changed since then, unless you suffered some significant anatomical loss during your tour of Afghanistan."

The agent looked affronted.

"No-everything's still there and working just fine. And that's not what I'm worried about."

"Oh" Brennan said in a flat tone, as Booth's byzantine thoughts finally made some headway in her much more efficiently organized mind. "I won't hold it against you. An erection would be quite natural under the circumstances. You shouldn't be embarrassed by a perfectly normal physiological reaction brought on by being next to an attractive, partially dressed female."

Right. Because her talking about an erection would definitely reduce the mortification factor.

He held his hands over his privates, feeling exposed as Brennan eyed him curiously.

"Has it happened already?"

The agent shifted his attention to the ceiling.

"St. Rose of Lima, St. Therese of the little Flowers..."

Ignoring their previous agreement, Brennan dove under the sheets before her partner could stop her. The feel of her skin, hot and silky, combined with the scratchiness of that lacy white bra caused Booth to suddenly go mute.

"Isn't this better?"

"Yeah" Booth agreed, after an extended pause.

He finally gave himself permission to relax into the flimsy mattress with Brennan clinging to him, meekly accepting his fate; basking in the wonder that was lying in bed next to the woman he'd loved for so long from afar. Alright, so maybe this wasn't exactly how he'd pictured getting there with her, but even if it was just a last-ditch measure to stay alive, it was still pretty wonderful.

Her next words caught him off guard.

"There isn't enough flammable material here to last more than twenty-four hours, even if we strip the cabin bare" Brennan stated with fatalistic casualness. "We're not going to make, are we?"

She was clearly tired and in need of some serious reassurance. Overriding every other concern he might have had, the agent wrapped both his arms around his partner and hugged her to his body, carefully maintaining certain mercurial regions at a respectable distance.

"Sure we are, Bones. We can rip the whole bedroom out if we need to. Besides, we got toothpaste, four granola bars, and we got ourselves a nice fireplace...in a way, it's kind of ro...not too bad, you know?"

He didn't have to look at her face to know she was probably narrowing those stunning blue peepers of hers with interest.

"You were going to say romantic."

"Well, it is sort of, right?"

"Only you would put such a positive spin on a situation so dire. It's one of the reasons I'm so irrationally fond of you."

Booth could feel the shift in her mood, the softness that had suddenly crept into her tone, and he redoubled his efforts to keep whatever fears were lurking there away for as long as he could.

"Thanks, Bones. Look, I'm not just being a naive optimist here. I've been through much worse and come through; _we've_ been through much worse. We have shelter, people aren't shooting at us..."

"And we're together."

"That too. Mainly that, actually. We're going to get out of here, and not in a coroner's van. You know, so it _is_ kind of romantic-not that we're like that or anything" he tagged on guiltily. "What I mean is that..."

"I know what you mean" Brennan replied, yawning wide. Such a very long day, and all of a sudden the overwhelming strain of it all hit her.

"You know, the snow, the fire-not the possum, though."

Brennan fell asleep to the sounds of her partner's playful, mostly incoherent jabbering.


	14. Trick or Treat

_About the content, don't worry. All is not as it seems. Happy Halloween!_

Sometime in the middle of the night Special Agent Seeley Booth walked out of Martin Snell's cabin, leaving his bewildered partner to wake up slightly chilled and very much alone. His clothes, his coat, his shoes had all vanished.

More tellingly perhaps, so had the gun he'd kept by their bedside in case of an emergency.

This wasn't just another run for more kindling; that much Brennan had already deduced after taking inventory of the small living room and its missing items with sleepy eyes that were growing flintier by the minute. Not when the world outside was so dark and unwelcoming and there was still a decent supply of firewood left inside for them to burn. Not without a whispered goodbye or even a nudge to warn her of his plans.

This was, without a doubt, chicanery of the worst, most duplicitous kind.

Booth had been wretchedly sly while carrying out his mission, not surprising since he used to be a top-of-the-line sniper and was now a top-of-the-line FBI agent. Thanks to those underhanded skills of his Brennan wasn't sure how much time had elapsed since his little act of betrayal-a lack of precision that in and of itself rankled-but given how cool his side of the bed felt and the lack of subsidence on the comforter where his body had been she calculated it had been slightly over an hour since her roommate had flown the aviary.

Something about that phrase was definitely amiss.

_Stabbed_ _her_ _between_ _the_ _latissimi_ _dorsi_.

No, not forceful enough.

_Flung her_ _under_ _a_ _minivan_...whatever.

Sooner or later Brennan was sure she'd hit on a sufficiently sinewy metaphor to convey the unforgivable scope of her companion's treachery, but it was pretty much a given that nothing would match the colorful images going through her head as she glared at Booth's empty pillow.

Her opinion of him couldn't have possibly been lower than it was at this witching hour; not even the hill of blankets carefully tucked all around her and a newly stocked fire by her feet could soften the anthropologist's heart even the tiniest bit towards the wayward agent. The jury was still out on whether future explanations would help him rise up those hallowed ranks.

Because more than just perplexed by Booth's untimely departure, Brennan was plain, old-fashioned hurt. Not even the very best of excuses could change that.

On second thought, scratch that, she decided, collecting her clothes off the floor and threading impatient arms, legs and head through them in a snit. 'Hurt' didn't even come close to capturing the extent of her ire.

She was _pissed_. Yes, pissed. Not a vulgar qualifier that a linguistically adroit novelist would normally lower herself to employ, but one that nevertheless described Temperance Brennan's decidedly prosaic mood to a T.

Finally. A word that did full justice to her frothing rage.

It wasn't just Booth she was mad at though, and that somehow made the deception sting worse. Because she herself had been an idiot. With the full conviction that her partner would honor their earlier agreement and stay put where he was for the rest of the night, she had relaxed a bit and given him a preview, albeit a brief, family-friendly one, of what might lie ahead for them if they could just get past their self-imposed isolation. And then _this_.

Brennan could hardly think of her own painful naïveté that evening without blushing. All she could say was, How could he?

But hours of fruitlessly searching for Booth through the penumbra-shrouded forest outside Snell's cabin-_their_ cabin now-had left the brightest star in the Jeffersonian's starry firmament with a much more debilitating, intrinsically less helpful emotion in place.

She was scared. For him, for them both.

Anger propelled, incited, motivated. But fear? Fear for the most part only held you back. Pissed, under the circumstances, would have definitely been a better sentiment to be harboring.

Stumbling with rare clumsiness over some hidden rocks, Brennan also recognized the early warning signs of an even bigger problem. Her stamina, fed earlier on by a blast of adrenaline and one hastily chewed granola bar, was running out fast. If she thought her choices had been paltry a few hours ago, they were almost infinite compared to what was available to her now.

The anthropologist had already thought about clawing out a small den for herself in the snow to give frost-bitten, aching limbs a break, but accidentally nodding off was a potentially deadly risk she decided she simply couldn't take. So rather than flirt with an ill-timed nap which could easily wind up killing her _and_ him-not that he didn't rightfully deserve it-Brennan stubbornly wrangled what few energy reserves she had left into action.

One tired, numb foot in front of the other in a bitterly cold journey that unfortunately didn't really seem to be getting her any closer to her target.

While the storm had abated a bit, maneuvering with any kind of grace through the wintry drifts it had already piled up was nothing short of impossible. Infinitely harder than Brennan had imagined it would be when she left the relative safety of Snell's one-time home to go on this wild goose chase looking for her partner. The stiff northerly wind the park ranger had alluded to earlier kept slinging ice crystals right into her face, and though ribbons of moonlight were occasionally peeking through the clouds and highlighting parts of the desolate landscape, for the most part Brennan was still as good as blind.

It somehow felt personal.

As if the stormy evening skies had banded together and swooped down from the very heavens, intent on burying the scientist under an avalanche of grim and violent portents. A leaden atmosphere which was beginning to reflect Brennan's deteriorating state of mind-unsettled and very much unsettling. And closing in on her fading hopes like the razored jaws of a sprung trap.

Daybreak, she feared, would do little to enhance her visibility. Or her and Booth's chances to come out of this latest ordeal alive.

But through it all, the supreme physical discomfort and the growing sense of isolation-the embryonic terror that was starting to possess her, even-there was never a thought of retreating back to Snell's and saving her own skin at Booth's expense. Whatever it took, Brennan was determined to reach her partner before it was too late. And if by all appearances he didn't seem to be anywhere in that shifting panorama of pale, fractured moonlight and plum-hued shadows, something-her gut, of all things-told her to keep on going because he couldn't be too far.

_Her gut..._

Through chattering teeth, an increasingly desperate Brennan took what consolation she could from an angry chuckle.

This was all _his_ doing, this reliance on instinct instead of hard, unassailable facts, because prior to meeting Booth she had certainly possessed no 'gut'. Stomach, intestines, liver, pancreas, sundry other internal organs, some vital some not-but no 'gut.'

Partnering up with him had obviously transformed her on a fundamental level. Affected her reasoning, her skills, her very essence, in a way that-yes, she was willing to give him that-had more often than not heightened them, but conversely also made them harder to explain and even harder to trust.

Charismatic, bold, more than a little bit dangerous-and in many ways, still very much a riddle begging to be solved. His handsome features and athletic build a little too easy on the eyes; his kind, noble spirit even more arresting still. All in all, Brennan acknowledged, a highly fortuitous combination of attributes, both tangible and intangible, few discerning women would have been able to resist.

No, not even she.

Booth had always been so many different things to her, a pinwheel of colors swirling into a seemingly single shade as it spun with manic energy in the breeze. Only on those rare occasions when he deigned to stop moving, and those even those rarer ones when he was willing to show outsiders a little bit of what lay behind the suit and the gun and the equal parts charm and irritating bluster, had Brennan felt like she'd gotten a glimpse of all the different tonalities that made up the man he really was.

Simple, yet incredibly complicated. Frightening on occasion, yet so very sweet and reassuring. Immature and even insecure at times, but also a full-grown, confident, capable man.

While Booth routinely confounded and annoyed her, he also challenged her-rather relentlessly, at that-to be more than she was. It was an exacting favor she had endeavored to repay in equally exacting kind. He was a man she respected, looked up to-and fallen in love with completely against her will and better judgment, won over by an inexhaustible supply of touching gestures and irreverent half-smiles.

He was also a man that very much needed finding before fate got a hold of him first.

For the hundredth time Brennan questioned why Booth had been so foolish as to leave the relative safety of their dwelling to go off on his own in this dismal weather. Was he out there getting help, or even more distressingly, was he attempting to draw some unknown danger she'd missed away from her?

The name Jacob Broadsky found its way to her tongue, filling her with instant distaste. Had the notorious killer managed to track them down, counting on the blizzard to cover his tracks? If so...

A spark of resentment flared up in the Brennan's red-rimmed eyes. After all these years didn't Booth know they were better, stronger together than they were on their own?

The torrent of fury quickly died back down. It seemed petty as well as counterproductive to be worrying about such irrelevancies now.

Because truly, there was no time to lose. Even without a single piece of evidence to support her hunch, Brennan was still certain that at this very moment Booth was being chased by death itself. And like a male version of Eurydice, he would need to rely on her, his resourceful Orpheus, to lead him back from the realm of the dead.

She just had to make sure that once she found him she wasn't tempted to look back; wasn't that the golden rule? That lack of faith could cost you everything?

Gunshots sullied the eerie bleached silence of that all-too quiet woodland, reverberating against bare trees and deep ravines with a series of hollow bangs. Brennan ran towards the sound but was surprised to find that even giving it her all she made almost no progress. Her boots seemed to be stuck to a thick layer of slush the same as if they'd grown roots, slowing her formerly brisk pace to a crawl.

The ground suddenly gave way and an unforgiving liquid chill began seeping up her pants, her shirt, her neck as she sank helplessly into a pool of frigid quicksand. She realized that soon she wouldn't be able to breathe-or worst yet, to help Booth at all. That they would both perish alone, so close, yet they might as well be universes away seemed like an incredibly cruel postscript for two people who'd been linked in a daisy chain almost since their very first encounter.

Maybe _that_ was their joint destiny, and not the optimistic family portrait Avalon and her fanciful deck of tarot cards had once painted for them.

She had to wonder. What had her life been like before Booth used every underhanded, guerrilla tactic on and off the books to wheedle his way into it, as covertly as he'd walked out if it last night? Brennan couldn't remember anymore. Or maybe she just didn't want to. Parts-_large_ parts, really-of that life weren't worth revisiting, not when there was so much of value in her current one.

With the glacial waters closing around her the scientist came back to that same thought that had been eating away at her all night. That she'd never gotten around to telling Booth that he mattered more to her than anything or anyone in the world. Had certainly never shown him even a fraction of what she felt or given their partnership a chance to turn into something more despite his tearful pleas from almost a year ago.

Would he still be here with her now if she had? No one had ever loved her as intensely as the man she called both partner and friend; she wondered with a stab of regret what that searing love of his would have felt like branding her bare skin with every touch, cradled deep within her sated body.

The world around her went black and Brennan inexplicably found herself back at the Jeffersonian, hunched over a set of remains on the platform, standing next to Booth. Dry and warm and not a hair out of place on either one of them when the screaming whir of a bullet splintering glass overhead made her flinch.

_Don't look back..._

Even with that interdiction fresh on her mind Brennan's eyes automatically sought out her partner. And once again, she was too late.

Hades, intractable ruler of the underworld had managed to outwit them both, his damning hand finding its way to the center of Booth's chest. The agent's shirt morphed from white to crimson with sickening speed, and for the second time in their partnership Brennan was forced to watch the man she loved die without being able to do a thing about it.

Throwing herself to the ground beside him, she begged him, bargained with him to do what her rational mind screamed was no longer possible-stay. Stay with her, keep loving her in that uncomplicated way of his that had never once asked for a thing in return.

But Booth was already gone, even as Brennan's bereft tears mingled with the blood now dwindling to a trickle as his body gave out.

Such desolation, such loss, that unerring shot had wrought. A single bullet, it had taken out two hearts along with a pocketful of dreams, unspent, unlived. Brennan could do nothing but weep; she'd been left behind yet again by someone she loved. But this time around, there'd be no way out of this loss. She just knew.

Why Booth-why Booth?


	15. Thirteen Minutes Til Five

_4:47_

Though hopes had initially run high, Sherry Snell's ill-fated present to her brother wound up only partially living up to it's name. True, it fully delivered on the warmth its fluffy good looks and vacuum sealed packaging had promised, but not even the comforter's impressive 650-count down filling could absolve the many hard, bumpy sins of the stone floor lying directly below.

Not that it mattered anymore, what with a slate-gray dawn already fighting tooth and nail to break through the clouds. Between the knowledge that the fire would have to be placated soon and those strange rustlings riding alongside pungent wisps of smoke, it was only a matter of time before one of two sore, stiff-backed sleepers felt guilted into getting out of bed.

Brennan noticed the shapeless murmurations first, along with the chill that was beginning to rim the air with a touch of frost. It came as no surprise that even after a broken night of sleep the scientist's observational skills remained in tip-top shape; she _was_ Temperance Brennan after all. Although in her beaten-up partner's defense, those exceptional powers had also been spared the twenty-foot tumble down that rocky ravine that had temporarily taken the special agent's own out of commission.

Sweeping a veil of bangs away from her spooked blue eyes, Brennan shot up from where she lay cocooned between random layers of sheets, coats and a pair of heavy, unyielding arms and stared cautiously ahead as the soft crinkling continued. The indeterminate nature of the noise was unnerving, reminiscent of cellophane being repeatedly crumpled in somebody's hand. Only when when she finally realized where she was-sitting on the floor of Martin Snell's rural outpost in little more than her underwear-did she summon the mental composure to consider matters a little more objectively.

She took a hurried look around the dwelling, but nothing about the sepia-toned surroundings struck Brennan as remotely alarming. Two small living room windows remained shut and the front door bolted, and nothing seemed even slightly out of place.

In fact, save for the inconvenient but unremarkable fact that fire was almost out yet again, things were very much as Brennan had left them right before she'd fallen rather speedily into Morpheus'-and her bare-chested companion's-waiting arms.

The anthropologist did, however, eyeball the increasingly dark fireplace with worry. They'd been forced to be 'stingy-assed' (Booth's words) with every branch, leaf and twig that went into the hearth, and that meant that only a bit of kindling could be added to the burning mass at any given time. This unfortunate need for frugality was unlikely to change anytime soon; at least not until the partners could figure how to get wood from a forest full of trees that was now so overrun by snow as to make it's numerous arboreal specimens virtually invisible, and for now just as inaccessible.

Irony at its finest Brennan thought bitterly, so perfectly captured in that ubiquitous Coleridge refrain. _Water_ _water_ _everywhere_ _and_ _not_ _a_ _drop_ _to_ _drink_...

And the odd sound, the one that initially made her start?

It turned out to be nothing as well. Just the crackle and fizz of beaten-down logs splitting apart as they blazed a trail into oblivion, their audible final hurrahs sparking over the slate surround of the fireplace before trailing off in a manner that fittingly reminded Brennan of tiny flares coming off a stranded ship.

And stranded they most definitely were.

She blinked once, twice, but nothing could make this picture of relative normality connect in any meaningful way with the many disbelieving neurons still going haywire inside her head.

Because only an instant ago she'd been sinking into a boggy field about to drown while Booth himself had been bleeding out on the floor of the lab, prey to one of Broadsky's meticulously hand-crafted bullets. In one of his typical displays of misguided heroics her coworker had bolted off into the night without her, she'd impetuously gone after him, and then they'd both paid dearly for their dual lack of prudence.

Every ounce of that recent terror had been real even if the events themselves obviously had not, so much so that Brennan's mind still didn't know what to make of all the contrary information her senses were now telegraphing her way.

What she needed to make reality stick was Booth. Nothing short of his presence, all six feet plus, two hundred ornery, argumentative, mystifying pounds of him would come close to putting these sinister new misgivings to rest.

With a pounding heart Brennan lowered her eyes to their improvised bed, shrugging off the light film of sweat which had begun to cool into a sea of shivers over her shoulders. Oddly, she didn't feel the stinging cold at all; only a stifling heat frothing and churning inside the pit of her stomach, a heat borne solely out of fear.

There was instant recognition of the sickening sensation because she'd felt it before one Christmas Day many years ago. A Christmas Day that, truth be told, she'd much rather not be reliving right now but which seemed determined to make a most unwelcome encore on this frigid April dawn just to spite her.

Fear of loss, of spending the rest of her days without the person who'd become her one constant, her main source of joy and solace and belonging. An irrational, soul-shredding fear that despite all the evidence in the world she might have lost him already. Brennan guessed-no, she _knew_-that whatever she saw or didn't see next to her on that bed would pretty much determine the direction as well as the tenor of the rest of her life.

A world without Booth-much as she prided herself on her resourcefulness and creativity as a writer, it was simply impossible for her to imagine such a thing, even less to put it into words. But she already understood that however it was scripted that world would be lonely, largely empty, and like that awful Christmas morning, a source of unending sorrow tainting the rest of her days.

Amazingly, mercifully, wonderfully, Booth was right there beside her on his back where she'd last seen him. Looking perfectly at ease and by all appearances just as perfectly alive. Mouth slightly ajar he was breathing in and out with a low rasp, his long arms and legs taking up most of the comforter's ample real estate and then some as a stray foot and a large, restless hand jutted out past the jumble of fabric onto the floor.

It was a rare thing to see Booth this unguarded, with his gun far removed from his person and his keen, ardent brown eyes closed. But perhaps even rarer was it for Brennan to be able to study her companion at her complete leisure without him staring back at her with his slightly defensive, 'why are you looking at me that way' expression that he often wore.

The scientist pursed her lips together and before long a grudging smile found its way to her lips.

A smile because she'd forgotten that Booth was something of a bed hog, a dirty little secret of his she'd unearthed when they'd gone undercover at that Florida circus and been forced to share a single bed. How could a habit that had so vexed her at the time been expunged from her thoughts so completely?

And it was suddenly all there.

The high-wire act, the knife-throwing, Booth's irritating pattern of always leaving his underwear on the floor. Limbs had gone flailing about that whole, crazy night and even with a barricade of pillows between them she'd woken up more than once with one of her roommate's wandering appendages on her person-appendages she'd thrown right back at him with just a twinge more forceful zeal than perhaps had been strictly necessary.

Subliminal retribution, no doubt, for that unintentional black eye he'd given her earlier in the day.

Where that small, inconsequential detail about Booth and his nocturnal habits had gone to roost the last few years was a complete mystery. Apparently, the information hadn't been considered significant enough to warrant a more prominent place in Brennan's memory bank. This time around, though, she vowed to take better note of this, as well as any other details which might crop up about him in the future. To guard them with better care, just in case they might come in handy later.

An unedited and highly inopportune reflection caused Brennan's insides to lurch and her pulse to beat a little bit faster.

_You're going to_ _need_ _a_ _king_-_sized_ _mattress in your future if you plan on getting any sleep._

How often, she wondered, still transfixed by Booth's dirt-smudged, bruised cheeks and the shock of hair that for once strayed onto his forehead instead of predictably flipping up and away from it, did a person get a second chance?

There it was, impossible to dismiss. Proof-of-life, one so unassailable that it should have satisfied even the biggest and baddest of skeptics.

No matter.

It still took a while for Brennan to let the truth she was observing sink in. That there were no jagged splinters of glass littering the floor, no Jeffersonian staff running amok in panic, no icy waters or stray bullets on the verge of stealing her and Booth's future. Just the two of them as always, alone in an empty, remote cabin, doing what they could to stay alive until help arrived or until they could figure out how to get that help for themselves.

In defiance of all the rules she'd pledged her life to, Brennan did something she hadn't done in long time-she thanked some nondescript higher power for her and Booth's apparent good fortune. Not that things were all that great, but they were still far better than they could've been.

It was a timely if unexpected reminder that she still _could_ pray, even if it meant very little now. Not like it had in the past, when prayers, while few, still bound her family together. When the most baffling of questions could theoretically be directed to the heavens with the expectation that it would be answered soon.

Were it only that easy. Some answers not even an entire pantheon of gods and goddesses could grant, not without a blood sacrifice so great as to make the asking far too expensive for the average human being to afford.

She kept tracking every one of Booth's movements for added reassurance.

Everything from the involuntary ticks making his eyelids flutter to the body that subtly rearranged itself as he unconsciously seemed to search for her absent form on the comforter.

But mainly, she couldn't tear her eyes away from the peaceful rise and fall of her bed-mate's chest. In that instant, overcome by a mixture of sadness for what she'd just witnessed and gratitude that none of it was true, she was almost tempted to give in to the desperate need she suddenly felt to hold him tight. To feel his strong, regular heartbeat against her own hyperbolic one. To bury herself against him and cry without restraint in the hopes that by allowing some of her inexplicable grief to escape through her tears she could purge her mind of even a fraction of the cruel, cruel images that had been visited upon her in her sleep.

It had all been a nightmare, of course; what else would it have been?

They were, after all, an entire state away and then some from the Jeffersonian. It was ludicrous to suppose that Broadsky, for all his cunning and doggedness, could have followed two trained experts such a long way without once being noticed.

Disentangling her aching legs from the blankets, Brennan crawled on hands and knees to the fireplace. She took a brittle-looking log from the rapidly shrinking stack and tossed it inside the nearly dead enterprise hoping it wasn't too late.

Before long, her enlarged pupils were following the unpredictable ebb and flow of the resulting flames. Their orange and blue dance was absolutely exquisite; pure, vibrant, cleansing. As irresistible a draw for humans now as it had been since the earliest days of man, when its glowing movements had provided not only warmth but an artificial, reassuring day in a world of endless twilight.

But the inherent beauty of that miraculous transmutation from matter into energy into life was lost on an utterly depleted Brennan as she saw not the wonders, but only the graphic truth that a person who'd witnessed hundreds-no, thousands-of untimely endings could envision within that spirited conflagration. Yes, Booth was alive, as was she, but for how long?

Only a few hours ago, her partner had come close to selling her on the highly questionable notion that Snell's ragtag castle possessed a certain ineffable charm about it. A romantic aura by virtue of its quaint construction and its fairy-tale setting that automatically rendered it less threatening to their personal safety than they both had initially adjudged it to be. That despite their mounting troubles things really weren't all that bad because she and Booth still had each other to rely on, and that was more than enough to overcome any obstacle.

It had been easy to believe him then, before this excruciating weariness, this unshakable sense of gloom had set in. Easy because it had been Booth doing the seducing, smiling at her in his most lethal, disarming way.

Easy because somehow, somewhere, she'd given him tacit permission to become the person she needed the most.

Wanted the most.

And yes, she could finally admit it, loved the most.

Easy because over the last several years, with his encouragement, his loyalty and his support, she'd relearned to do the one thing she thought she could never _ever_ do again after living for years in a state of voluntary emotional isolation: trust.

So yes, when he told her everything would be fine, she had mindlessly latched onto his inexhaustible faith. Had even come to believe for a split second that their sad-sack refuge might theoretically rival the ancient Alhambra Palace itself for romance, obvious as it now was that those two disparate structures didn't share a single thing in common.

But in this, the very darkest hour before dawn, that comforting simile no longer held any validity for a lost and troubled Temperance Brennan. The only thing the anthropologist could see as she pored over their ill-lit shanty with vacant eyes and an equally empty heart was a tomb, not a safe-house for lovers. Dreary, claustrophobic, final; as nefarious and inescapable a prison as the Grave Digger herself had ever devised for her many victims.

After holding out for as long as she could, Brennan at last gave in to the deep despair she felt. She covered her face with her hands in an effort to quell a growing cry that refused to stay bottled up inside her throat and then quietly, carefully, she let herself fall to pieces between her spread-out fingers. So quietly that her soft whimpers might have gone undetected by her partner save for the fact that his own slumber too had been fractured at best.

"What...Is anything wrong?" Booth asked groggily, at first noticing not the sheer agony etched on Brennan's face but only the familiar contours of her silhouette. In his initial confusion about where they were and why, he instinctively reached for the gun by his pillow, ready to take on any threat on her behalf.

The shock on Brennan's tear-streaked face as she stared down the barrel of his revolver made the agent's heart sink, and his grip on the weapon immediately slackened. "Um...do you want me to put it down?"

"Yes."

"I'm sorry" he apologized, placing the gun back on the floor. "Are you okay?"

"I...I'm fine."

Her words were saying one thing, but the trembling voice and the tears told Booth it was a lie. He waited in silence in the hopes that his partner would come clean on her own.

Brennan took a deep, halting breath before finally admitting what they both already knew.

"No; I'm not. _Nothing_ is 'fine'."

"Bones, what's wrong?"

"We should have taken your car, Booth" she said, crying openly now. "We should have taken your car."


	16. Storm of the Century

_We should have taken your car..._

The dread, the overriding guilt running through that thin, incorporeal voice shook Booth fully awake. He sat up and examined his coworker more closely.

It was clear that something had happened to her while he'd been tossing and turning away his humdinger of a day on Snell's floor. Something big that had caused his normally calm, poised, confident Bones, the unflappable professional who'd put him back together like Humpty-Dumpty just a few hours ago, to lose all sense of perspective. True, she'd been a bit on edge right before they went to bed last night and maybe her unusual behavior now was simply a natural result of the emotional toll their combined troubles had taken, but this seemed more far-reaching than that.

The woman before him wasn't just upset; she was almost unrecognizable in the utter magnitude of her grief.

In nothing but her underwear and with what little make-up she'd been wearing long gone, she looked incredibly young and vulnerable, like her entire soul had been laid bare for everyone to see. She also looked hauntingly lovely Booth reflected, with her loose hair etching a crown of spectral highlights around her stricken features and her pale skin almost phosphorescent in the tawny light of the fire. Resembling not so much _his_ Temperance Brennan but a beautiful, lost spirit from another world wandering in anguish through his.

Booth's heart tightened into a knot of repressed longing.

Every protective instinct in him was telling him to do something, and do it fast. As man who'd always preferred doing to talking, he very nearly reached out and forcefully yanked his partner back to the comforter with him, even at the risk of starting a Third World War. A course of action which might have been perfectly acceptable had Booth not feared that once he took her in his arms he wouldn't be able to stop there.

Especially not if Bones, ensnared in that web of pain and confusion, lacked the presence of mind to put up any resistance.

Because more than anything, beyond offering up a friendly embrace and a few consoling phrases, he wanted to kiss her; to lay his mouth against hers and lap up the tears that had made their way down her cheeks to her lips and taste their salty bite on his tongue. To cover every inch of her body with his; to shield her from whatever pain she was feeling, even if it meant making every last bit of that pain his own.

To make love to her-to just _love_ her, not just with his heart, but with his entire being.

Anything to set her free from that terrible past that still hurt her and this cursed present where she insisted on suffering all by herself.

But acting on any of those desires would have been inherently wrong and Booth knew it. Close as he and Bones were, they weren't anywhere near the point where he could indulge in taking such liberties without feeling like he'd be taking advantage of her in the process.

Especially not tonight.

She needed words first, maybe words only. And if that's all he had to work with, then so be it.

Digging through a mountain of sluggish thoughts, the agent searched for something, anything, to try to calm his partner down. He ran with the first thing he found although he guessed in the state she was in, it was unlikely to do a lick of good.

"We went over this, Bones. I'm the one who left the lights on," he reminded her patiently. "Not you."

"Because I asked you to."

"Bones, what's gotten into you? We agreed that..."

"This is all my fault" she continued, deaf to every argument. "We shouldn't even be here-we should have just gone straight to your game, like you wanted."

"It wasn't anyone's fault-it was an accident. Things happen."

He should have _never_ let her catch him writing that note to Parker, Booth berated himself. It had clearly put all sorts of ideas in her head that wouldn't have been there otherwise.

Booth patted Brennan's side of the bed reassuringly, as if the motion itself held some mystical power to summon. "You're just exhausted, Bones. Come back here and get a little more sleep-you'll feel better in the morning."

The anthropologist shook her head in defiance.

Her hair, tamed into lanky complaisance ever since her return from Maluku, had regained some of its former life overnight and it now bounced from side to side in soft waves, as if underscoring her refusal to be soothed.

"I could have at least allowed you to go in search of help on your own. I was so intent on maintaining my parity with you on everything that I overlooked the most obvious of facts. Your superior stamina and military training coupled with your more practical attire made your odds of survival much better than mine. You would have probably made it out to the main road on your own yesterday afternoon, wouldn't you?"

"We don't _know_ that," Booth argued. "Look at what happened to me when you left me alone for five minutes. I'm pretty sure my hiking abilities aren't getting a five-star rating on Angie's List anytime soon. I could've already been an icicle by now, for all we know. Hey, God works in mysterious ways. Maybe there's a reason things went the way they did."

"God?" Brennan scoffed darkly. "If there _was_ a God, Parker wouldn't be in the likely position of losing his father or Hank his grandson and primary caregiver."

"It doesn't work like that, Bones. Besides, if we'd skipped this trip, how do we know something else, something _worse_ wouldn't have happened to either one of us?"

"Worse than this? Short of you having died from that fall, what could be worse?"

"I don't know-you could have gotten into a terrible accident driving to Baltimore with all the ice on the roads, or I could have been nailed by Broadsky on my way to that stupid retreat," Booth countered. "Neither of those things sounds that far-fetched to me. Pretty plausible, in fact."

He wasn't simply exaggerating for her benefit, either; if the last twenty-four hours had shown Booth anything it was that whatever _could_ go wrong on this insane day _would, _regardless of where they were at. At least in Snell's cabin, they had the ability to do some damage control.

"You're talking about purely theoretical events, the existence of which will never be proven. It's simply speculation on your part. We're running out of things to burn, Booth, and we have no way to call for assistance. Those aren't theories; they're immutable truths."

Each new position Booth took-and there were many to come-was forcibly rebuffed, and after a few more tries the ex-Ranger came to accept that no amount of logic was going to move his case along even an inch. For some unknown reason his partner was on a mission to beat herself up and it would be an uphill battle to get her to stop. Few people could be as hard on their personal failings, real or in this case imagined, as his Bones.

He could never outsmart her, but he might be able to steamroll over her doubts by sheer force of will if he could only make himself sound sincere enough. It was a tricky thing, though, because Booth was sure that whatever her dire predictions were on the little matter of getting out of Snell's cabin in one unfrozen, breathing piece had already crossed his own mind at some point. So maybe if he couldn't totally pull off the sincerity part, he could at least overwhelm her with his insufferably sunny outlook on things.

"We're going to be fine, I swear" he said with a forced grin. "You're not being rational, Bones. Just take a minute, settle down, and let's think this situation through. We're both still here, aren't we?"

No go; Brennan's stubborn streak wasn't going anywhere.

"If you don't get to see Parker again..." the prospect was too awful for words and her eyes once again filled with tears.

"Hey" Booth said, finally giving in to the irrepressible urge he'd felt to comfort her. He pulled himself up to his companion and gently touched her chin, raising it slightly so that their eyes were forced to meet. "That's not going to happen. They're going to find us-I work for the FBI, remember? And then there's all those really annoying but persistent squints of yours. They could find an ant on Mount Everest."

Brennan shut her eyes, unwilling to be won over by Booth's affectionate gaze or his breezy tone. Not this time. Not after what she'd seen.

"No-you don't really believe that. You're just trying to make me feel better."

With a frustrated sigh Booth steadied himself for the long road ahead. Optimism for Bones meant nothing if it wasn't supported by facts-a supremely inconvenient but perfectly reasonable demand. He didn't need proof-but _she_ did. And now as always, he was going to do whatever it took to get her to where she needed to be.

"Bones, in battle, if you lose the positive attitude, you've automatically lost the war-lost everything. We're going to get out of here _alive_, promise. I refuse to be beaten by that lemon those scammers sold you and some idiotic snow, not after all the really awful stuff we've been through. I mean Gorgonzola, the Grave Digger, Epps-this is nothing. The last blizzard didn't get the better of us, and neither will this one. We're at the top of our game, here, you and I; you have to know that's a _fact_."

His frame slumped in recognition that he'd run out of things to say. "I wish I could make you see that."

Booth considered his next words a dizzying number of times before deciding Brennan would appreciate the truth better than most.

"Besides, if...if something does happen-which it won't-I _know_ Parker will be fine. We may have had our bad moments now and then, but Rebecca's a good mom. And Parker's a really strong kid."

Brennan swallowed back some tears as she struggled to get a hold on her emotions.

"He got that from you," she replied softly. "Still, I shouldn't have forced you to go with me."

Booth smiled; yes, as if spending time with a brilliant, gorgeous woman with a heart of gold that he also happened to be crazy in love with constituted some unspeakable punishment.

"Who said anything about being forced? We were doing what we were supposed to be doing. Working a case so we could put the bad guys behind bars to keep them from hurting someone else. Our job comes with risks-it always has; we both know that. Besides, you didn't make me do anything. I _wanted_ to come-I like being with you, Bones. Even if I'd known I was going to end up at the bottom of a ditch looking like Frankenstein after the angry mob ran after him, I would've still come with you. Before, when I was complaining, it was just out of habit; you know, the avoidance thing again."

He shrugged his shoulders before adding, "I swear, we go back and forth so often, you and me, that sometimes I forget how to have a normal conversation around you."

The angle of Brennan's head changed subtly as the scientist considered just how much truth there might be behind her partner's assurances.

"If I'd been the one doing the asking, you would have come, right?" Booth pressed.

The question earned him a wan smile.

"Yes; you know I would have. And it's Gormogon, not Gorgonzola."

Booth finally saw a bit of sun as the leading edge of this latest front seemed to have passed them by.

"So, do you really like being with me?" Brennan asked meekly, caught between a pouty sniffle and a genuine smile.

"Yeah-c'mon, you know that" Booth replied, a little unnerved as those tear-heavy lashes were batted his way, revealing a hint of heavenly blue underneath. "I like it a lot; there's no one else I'd rather be with."

There was something in Booth's amber and gold-tinged brown eyes that Brennan had never allowed herself to see before, although she suspected it'd been there a very long time. Maybe even since that very first meeting so many years ago.

It was her future-_their_ future. It was scary and amazing and it beckoned, asking if she'd have the courage to embrace it or whether she'd let it slip away for a second time. Lightning could strike a person twice, but very rarely a third time.


	17. The Night of the Comet

"What?" Booth demanded, visibly shaken by Brennan's hard scrutiny. The sort of look he was used to seeing on her face back at the lab, when she was laying the skeleton of some poor, lonely sap out for study.

That intense, unforgiving, crazy-manic focus of hers couldn't possibly bode well for anyone, not least of all because it was usually reserved for the dead. With a sudden pinprick of worry Booth snuck a look down at himself to make sure that everything that was supposed to be covered still _was_.

So far so good, but if he had to be honest, not by much. He tugged the covers up past his hips just in case.

"What is it, Bones? Why are you so quiet? You're freaking me out."

Without explanation, Brennan sprung forward and kissed her confused partner just like she'd fantasized about doing earlier that evening. Like she'd wanted to do, in one form or another, for years. Kissed the living daylights out of him until she felt his hand cradling the back of her head in response. With a shiver she willingly evanesced against Booth's lips, sensing their promise of a sultry, spectacular spring on her own.

Lips glued to hers, Booth began winding his hand down Brennan's mostly naked back, fractionally shifting their positions, moving his hips against hers in sensuous, timeless synchronicity...and then he stopped. He was still hovering over her mid-air when he suddenly hung his head down between his shoulders and whispered a single, terrifying word.

"Bones..."

Brennan immediately sat up.

She pushed her partner away, filled with the stirrings of a deep, awful ache. One so fierce, it made her want to run out the door of Snell's cabin and never turn back even if it meant freezing to death.

Because it was impossible not to notice. That woven into that often-used nickname, that ever-present 'Bones' of his which had always been so full of affection and playfulness in the past, there were suddenly strands of implied censure.

"If you don't want to..."

"Of course I want to-are you _kidding_ me?" a conflicted Booth replied, lifting his head just enough to shoot a doleful peek at his companion. "I haven't wanted anything _ever_ this much."

Two plus two was always, without exception, four. Four. Never five. The figures weren't adding up for Temperance Brennan and her demeanor, already circumspect, became icier still as she wrapped her arms guardedly around her bare midriff.

"Then why are we stopping?"

Why indeed? Booth wasn't quite sure himself; there was no denying that everything he'd ever wanted was right there before him.

All he had to do was reach for it and it was his.

So why? Maybe because concealed within their unfolding desire, the long-simmering passion between him and Bones that was now clearly heading for a boil, there were traps that could wind up sucking the joy out of any shared moment beyond this one-at least for him. Or maybe because things were just going a little too smoothly, and nothing had ever been this uncomplicated in his life.

"It's just...I'm not sure," he admitted. "I guess I wanted this to be the real deal when it happened-not the equivalent of an end of the world fire sale. If-_when-_we get out of here, I don't want to be asking myself if we would've...you know...gotten together except for the fact that we were about to meet our maker. Well, at least me," he added with a brief attempt at humor. "You'll probably be scrambling for another plan. But for the record, Bones, I'm not capable of turning you down, not even knowing that this right here might be all there is."

Brennan guessed that by 'we,' Booth was referring only to her. She'd turned him down a little over a year ago, and he was probably still nursing doubts about her commitment.

It hadn't been the reaction she expected, but it was one Brennan understood all too well.

As she herself knew, the past had an unfortunate habit of seriously coloring a person's view of the present. Sometimes, like now, in the most atrocious, unflattering shade there was.

That's why it was absolutely imperative to make Booth understand that her desire for him, so painfully acute right now, wasn't just a passing phase, or a hormonal byproduct of the dire straits they were in. It had been there always, this vast longing for both her partner's body and his heart, and it was unlikely to ever go away.

Brennan picked up her metaphorical brush, ready to leave a brighter, clearer imprint on the messy canvas of their relationship.

"What date did you write down?" she asked.

"_Date_? Bones, what the heck are you talking about?"

To the best of Booth's knowledge they'd been discussing sex, not appointments, and he wondered if the cold and the stress-and maybe one of those wretched granola bars too many-had finally gotten to his coworker.

"The last blizzard we were in, you made us write down dates and then we burned them. You said if we picked a time and we both desired it enough, we'd finally get together. I no longer have any imperviousness left-I'm quite certain I lost it all a while back. Are you still feeling angry?"

The ex-Ranger shook his head, recalling that candlelit chat in his apartment after they'd finally managed to squeeze out of that cursed elevator. When he and Bones had finally discussed, if in the most obtuse, roundabout way possible, what they hoped to eventually get from each other.

"No-I haven't been angry in a long time."

"So what date did you pick?" Brennan persisted. "I chose April 19th of this year."

It didn't take long for the announcement with its earth-shattering implication to sink in.

"That's...tomorrow."

"No. It's already after midnight."

"So it's...today?"

"Yes."

"Bones, I _know_ that wasn't the date. You wrote down May..."

"And how would you know that?" Brennan asked, bristling with suspicion.

"Because I looked, and then...well, I sort of wrote down the same date you did."

Even factoring in all the extenuating circumstances, Brennan couldn't suppress the genuine affront she felt.

"_You cheated_?" she squeaked.

"Really, you're gonna pick on me for _that_? _Now_?" Booth retorted, rolling his eyes in bewilderment. "Okay, listen-I'm sorry about the cheating. You're not really angry at me for looking, are you? I swear, I only had the best of intentions."

"I guess not. But you're wrong about what date I wrote. It was April 19th."

"But what if it _wasn't_?"

He was doing it. Booth was questioning her perfectly sound methodology and Brennan frowned, smarting from equal parts lost patience and injured professional pride.

"You've chosen a very inconvenient time to be so dogmatic about the line separating truth from benevolent fantasy. Whatever happened to your willingness to promote suspension of belief for the benefit of others, like you do for Parker at Christmas and Easter?"

Why was he being so intractable? Reaching over to where Booth had left them, Brennan grabbed the notepad and pen she'd caught him using before. She tore two semi-dry pieces of paper out, handing one to her partner.

"Here" she said, scribbling down 'April 19' and showing her piece of paper to Booth. She gave him the pen and saw confusion mixed with hope on his face as she folded her note in two and threw it into the fire. It blazed briefly like a comet crossing the evening sky and then it was gone.

"April 19th of _this_ year," Brennan reiterated. "So you see, according to your own idiosyncratic set of rules, this was going to happen anyway. Today, as a matter of fact. No apocalyptic scenarios involved. You can call it 'fate' if it makes you feel more comfortable. It's your turn. My wish apparently won't come true if we both don't want it."

Booth swallowed nervously.

"Today," he repeated after her. "You sure about that?"

She nodded.

"Earlier, you stated that by doing nothing we were only expediting our demise; that if we didn't take a chance, we weren't going to make it. 'You can't make a fire without the risk of getting burned' is what you said, or something to that effect. This is _my_ risk to take, Booth, and I very much want this to happen. I don't need to wait any longer. There's no reason to wait. I know how I feel about you, and if our history as partners and friends is any indication, I'm also quite certain that I know how I'm going to feel about you after we're done. Just as I understand perfectly well what taking this next step means for our relationship. But if you're still not ready..."

_Not ready my ass..._

This time it was the Booth's turn to kiss his shell-shocked companion with the urgency of a sinner speeding towards salvation. His hands disappeared under the mountain of blankets to reemerge all over her skin, efficiently helping Brennan get out of her few remaining garments.

Their lovemaking was easy, familiar; it felt like coming home. Tangible proof, if any was needed, that this _was_ the right time, the god-given time, for the partners to start something new. To break free of the old, stagnant patterns that had kept them running in place instead of moving forward. Twin strands of DNA, together giving shape to a single future.

But more than that, it brought hope. That two wounded human beings could at last see themselves no longer as injured and incomplete, but whole. Worthy of receiving boundless love, and just as capable of loving back in equal measure.

They would, Booth and Brennan, remember everything about these next, delirious moment for the rest of their lives. The first time they touched each other so intimately, with such tenderness and purpose. Touched not under the guise of friendship or compassion or reassurance, but of raw desire. A desire that wasn't simply born out of lust, or a need to forget, even for a few minutes, that their time on this earth might be numbered not in years, but days.

It was love.

Stripped down to its most wonderful, primal, joyful essence. Love now, love for years, love forever. Because Seeley Booth loved his partner-had loved her almost since the first day they met-just as Temperance Brennan loved hers. In a way that made their hearts both hurt and rejoice and that had always burned bright, whether they were near each other or continents away.

In a way that defied explanations, and which was as transcendent as it was immutable.

And things finally happened that most strange and beautiful of snowy April nights because they absolutely _had_ to happen. Because they made sense given who Booth and Brennan were and everything they meant to each other.

But mostly, because they were finally ready, and they'd waited long enough.


	18. Stairway to Heaven

_Thanks guys-you've collectively shown the patience of Job. If anyone is interested, I may try to do a postscript to tie up any loose ends. _

_Happy soon-to-be Bones Day!_

The shift in Snell's living room was almost imperceptible.

A quiet light that gradually grew stronger, bringing faint hints of life to the dead man's sparse belongings. From the couch that now looked pinkish/orange instead of tan (not a real improvement though, even with its faded paisley print) to the drab pictures of game birds on the walls which had been nearly invisible the day before.

The couple snuggling on the floor didn't seem to notice that their little world was slowly changing. Wrapped in each other's arms, they lay in a blissed-out state of fulfilled passion, oblivious to the carousel of shadows circling by.

Something about the tranquil interlude, how simple and perfect it was, or how much peace it brought his perennially embattled soul, prompted Booth to make a promise. A pretty risky one, considering his audience's known animosity towards all things supernatural.

"Bones-I know you don't believe in an afterlife, but when I get there, if it's any good, I'm gonna turn around, find you, and bring you back with me. It may take me a while, but I'm hoping if I keep working on it, I'll make it to the big leagues one day."

To underscore how deadly serious he was about the offer he held his partner even tighter against him, leaving behind an affectionate kiss on the top of her head.

The pledge was outlandish-ridiculous-and touchingly earnest, just as Booth himself often was, and maybe for one or all of those reasons or simply because she was feeling so very carefree just now it amused Brennan more than it normally would have. She committed herself even deeper to the warmth of her partner's chest to hide the quirky little smile the comment had triggered, for fear it might somehow end up hurting his feelings.

This was _terra_ _incognita _after all_, _she recognized_._

They were far more than they'd been hours ago, her and Booth, and it was unclear just how much of their old, pugnacious selves they could still keep without their usual lively repartee being taken out of context.

"I'm sure you'll reach your goal sooner or later, Booth" Brennan replied, sticking with something safe. "You're a very good man-and you're also incredibly stubborn."

She lifted her eyes to a patch of prickly stubble and a reassuringly Boothy grin.

"Although as you already pointed out, I'm an atheist; in the unlikely event that heaven does exist, I don't think your St. Peter could be moved to grant me access, regardless of the moral qualifications of the person making the request. I'm pretty sure that faith is a non-negotiable prerequisite for entry into paradise."

Booth sat up and gave his partner a long, deliberate look before declaring with a cocksure smirk,

"I've been known to work greater miracles."

Even with a fourth degree black belt to her name, Brennan still wasn't able to hang on to her partner's openly devouring gaze for more than a second; just long enough to feel her insides begin to melt under that red-hot, highly suggestive stare.

"The act of lovemaking constitutes a miracle in your world view?" she asked with a self-conscious laugh. "Your standards appear to be much lower than the Vatican's."

"You're the miracle, Bones. Always you-being with you."

The compliment led to a little snort and a skeptical tilt of the head.

"Are you planning on always being this romantic in the future, Booth?"

The remark was meant as a bit of a rebuke, something to help keep her and Booth's see-saw universe in check, but Brennan suspected that the ornery part of the comment hadn't come through at all. Because truly, if the man she'd just lassoed her life to wanted to make her feel this unabashedly special on a regular basis, what could she legitimately have to fuss about?

"Every single day" Booth replied, drawing imaginary circles on her shoulder with his thumb. "Just you wait."

Brennan wiggled her way out of the agent's grasp and sat beside him, a sheet wedged under her armpits.

"I think I'm ready, Booth."

"_Again_? he asked with an exaggerated backwards thump into his pillow. "Give me a minute to recover, Bones."

"I'm _not_ referring to sex, Booth."

"Oh."

"Although, I wouldn't necessarily object to making love a third time."

The vampy look coupled with the dark undertone in Brennan's voice made _Booth's_ cheeks burn, for a change. "Or a fourth," she teased.

"No" Booth agreed.

Any other response would have made him the world's biggest liar. In fact, he could already feel a geyser of lust shooting up his groin. "I wouldn't complain either."

"But I was actually talking about our conversation earlier, when I asked you if you thought we'd ever be ready to say the things we needed to say to each other. And I am."

"And what's that?"

"That for a very long time I was willfully ignoring my feelings for you because I was afraid of change and what it might do to our relationship."

"I don't get it. What was there to be afraid of, Bones? I..."

What the heck-prudence was for wimps. Booth decided to jump into the frying pan head first; it's not as if she could call a cab and head for the airport.

At least not yet.

"I love you. It hasn't changed me. Well, that's not true. It changed me, but in a good way. Change can be good. _Really_ good," he finished, scooting up next to her. "Look at me with Parker, Hodgins with Angela, Cam and Michelle."

He watched his companion's face closely for signs of panic, but she seemed to be taking the news fairly well.

"I'm willing to subscribe to that premise now, even though it's not exactly a rational position for me to take considering some of my past experiences."

"Your parents?"

Brennan nodded pensively.

"My parents, of course, and other...things. Personal commitments that didn't exactly work out as I'd planned. But I've always maintained that risk is an essential part of growth, and I want to keep growing. Besides, I trust you."

At the beginning, it had been hard to even consider it. The mess of feelings she so often felt around Booth had always eluded definition, perhaps because defining them meant they were real; that they had power over her. Later, when those feelings had at last gelled into an inescapable conclusion, they still refused to be spoken out loud. The words wouldn't-couldn't come. An admission of such magnitude might open the heart to unimaginable pain, not just for her, but for him as well.

But no longer-the man who'd been so tenderly holding her in his arms just an instant ago had changed all those perceptions.

And that man deserved to know.

"I love you too, Booth. Whatever happens next, however it ends, I love you."

Booth's answer-the only one he could give that even came close to capturing how he truly felt, how his heart was bursting with almost unimaginable joy-was a thorough, highly motivated kiss. Velvety, scrumptious tongue action that predictably skittered out of control as soon as it began.

And that minute that Booth claimed he needed to recover? Not needed after all.

Not one bit.

Later, much later, Brennan woke up to an empty bed and a room so drenched with light she had to give her watery eyes a minute to adjust.

She stretched out languidly on the comforter before her attention drifted to a constellation of dust motes swarming above her head. Caught in a ray of blinding sunlight, the whirling, eddying pattern reminded Brennan of an intricate Buddhist mandala.

She smiled. Perhaps it was a sign that there _was_ a bit of Booth's fairy-tale magic left in Snell's cabin, after all.

When she finally sat up with an unfettered yawn she found Booth stark naked, his tall, powerful frame at full attention, standing mutely by one of the living room's two windows.

Only after her suddenly possessive eyes had gone over every inch of her partner's exceptionally symmetrical form, the fine wide shoulders and muscled back and the even finer behind, did Brennan think to catch up with the owner's expression. All she could see from her limited vantage point was his profile, but even from this angle she could still tell that Booth's features were unusually watchful and hard.

A defensive military stance that compelled her to get out of bed in a rush to join him.

"What's wrong?" she asked, wrapping a blanket around herself and shuffling over to where Booth stood, immobile and silent as a cobra about to strike.

He shook his head without once looking back.

"Nothing," he said, still staring into the distance. "I thought I heard something out there, but I must just be imagining things."

The short trip to the window revealed yet another one of Booth's 'miracles,' in a morning that had already provided more than a few.

Yesterday's oppressive clouds had disappeared, treating the anthropologist to the lavender-edged, multi-tonal blue skies of an immaculate dawn. With a waning Venus still standing guard on the horizon, the sun's early splendor poured itself onto the white landscape in a crisp, pure light that caused the vast fields of virgin snow to shimmer like a carpet of diamonds.

"It's beautiful" Brenan declared, finding herself at an unprecedented loss for words. On a whim, she threw her arms around her partner's waist from behind and pressed her face against the hollow between his shoulder blades, encasing them both in her blanket.

As soon as he felt Brennan's warm, nude curves surrounding him, Booth turned around.

"Yeah, it is" he replied, looking down at the woman embracing him-at the clear, bright eyes that so reminded him of stars in winter-as he smiled.

The agent took a deep breath and rubbed his cheek lovingly against his partner's hair. The prospect of their almost certain salvation should have thrilled him and then some, but it put him in a melancholy funk instead.

The storm of the century-the one that should have lasted days-was over, defying weather satellites, doom-and-gloom meteorologists and isobar charts alike. Soon, very soon, they'd be on their way back to civilization. On their way to being surrounded by people and work and crimes and all other sorts of major distractions, unable to ever focus exclusively on each other like they'd done the past twenty-four hours.

Still, it wasn't all that bad, Booth conceded. Most likely they wouldn't be heading back in a coroner's van, Bones had pretty much promised they'd be together no matter what, and the neglected carnivore in him would finally be appeased.

He'd just have to be extra vigilant about protecting what had blossomed in such solitude.

It was sweet, and exciting and erotic, all this electric silence, like the static hum hanging in the air just before a lighting storm, and Booth bent down to kiss Brennan's lips again. Those lips that had driven him insane for years were no longer just a final destination; more than a little bruised and enticingly pink, they were now a departing point for more exotic, intimate travels-and hot damn if he couldn't wait to hop on that love train again.

They were still milling by the window, laughing playfully and taking their time with one another, when a loud knock at the door caused Booth and Brennan first to freeze and then almost immediately to fly apart. Though neither would say the name, the obvious tension in their stances suggested that they were both thinking the same thing.

Broadsky.

"Agent Booth," a male voice yelled. "Dr. Brennan!"

It didn't sound at all like Broadsky, but Booth wasn't taking any chances. Sprinting towards their bed, he scooped his gun off the floor and reached for a pillow, belatedly holding it like a shield over his more vulnerable parts.

He opened the door just a fraction and was immediately greeted by a sight that utterly confounded him.

The voice belonged to Ranger Rick, their friendly, overly-loquacious guide from yesterday's park station stop. Standing next to him were two other men and, judging by their badges and generally dour demeanor, they were G-men just like Booth.

Topped by his stubby hat and a government-issue parka that emphasized his rather generous bulk, the ranger smiled at Booth through the tiny sliver of light. A few yards behind him sat a heavy-duty service truck, still running, its over-sized tires clad in silver chains.

Had Booth not been so flustered by almost being caught in the most compromising of positions with his roommate, he would have most certainly thought twice about opening the door all the way. Because as soon as the wide-eyed park ranger got an eyeful of his idol-the lovely, if cantankerous, Dr. Temperance Brennan, and Agent Seeley Booth and his strategically placed pillow-at the pair's curious state of undress and their ambushed expressions-he immediately broke into a huge grin.

"Well, lookee here," he chuckled, brimming with nothing but goodwill towards the newly minted couple. "Seems like you two found your own romantic nook in the Poconos, after all..."


End file.
